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THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 



^J1^2^ 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
EDUCATION 



BEING 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION IN 

THE RELATED NATURAL AND 

MENTAL SCIENCES 



BY 



HERMAN HARRELL HORNE, Ph.D. 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AND PEDAGOGY 
IN DARTMOUTH COLLEGE 






KTeJu g0tk 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1904 

All rights reserved 







UBRAKYoy CONGRESS 
Two Copies Reesived 


urn 16 1904 


. i • 


Cooyrigft Entry 
CLASS A, 50(c. Nb. 


/-. ,. 


CO>Y a 





Copyright, 1904, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up, electrotyped, and published March, 1904. 



J. S. Cashing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



TO 
HENRY HORACE WILLIAMS 

WHO 

IN THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA 

FIRST TAUGHT ME 

THE PLEASANTNESS AND THE PEACE 

OF THE PATH OF PHILOSOPHY 



PREFACE 

"What, then, is education, and how are' we to 
educate ? As yet there is no agreement on these 
points. Men are not agreed as to what the young 
should learn, with a view either to perfect training 
or the best life. It is not agreed whether education 
is to aim at the development of the intellect or of the 
moral character. Nor is it clear whether, in order 
to bring about these results, we are to train in what 
leads to virtue, in what is useful for ordinary life, 
or in abstract science." 

These are modern words from Aristotle. They 
indicate for us the Babel of voices in the educational 
world. The times call not for another voice, louder 
than the others, but, if it can be had, for a quiet 
vision of the compelHng truth. I have simply at- 
tempted in the following pages to help remove the 
veil from the face of educational truth, in the light 
of which, perhaps, some confused teacher may find 
the way to his appointed task. I have no war to 
wage, not even a battle to fight, wherewith to feast 
the eye of workers hungry for the bread of educa- 
tional life. My purpose has rather been to do the 

more serviceable, if less spectacular, thing of passing 

vii 



Vlll 



Preface 



on to willing ears the word of the still, small voice 
as it has vouchsafed to speak to me, Ustening, as 
I watched the educational combats. The artificial 
manufacture of educational systems is noisy in our 
day; the natural growth of the educated life is 
always noiseless. 

My word to the warring sects is peace through 
unity. I have attempted to organize the contem- 
porary conflicting claims in a system of mutual de- 
pendence, giving value where value belongs. The 
educational truth to-day is in the unification of those 
educational truths for which the separate factions are 
fighting. If claims can be rightly adjusted, harmony 
should ensue for a season, until, indeed, the educa- 
tional life develops new contradictions to be synthe- 
sized. I cannot hope to have presented a satisfactory 
organization of these opposing tendencies, but only 
to have suggested where the contemporary educa- 
tional problem lies, and, perhaps, some of the ele- 
ments of its solution. The present problem of 
education, really one of organization, is too often 
and too easily solved by an over-simpHfication of its 
elements; whereas a process so complex and even 
confused in detail as education is, can be truly sim- 
plified only by synthesis. The truth is in^ the whole, 
not in the part. 

With this message in mind, I have written for 
those choice spirits everywhere among teachers (may 
their tribe increase !) who love to pass at times out 



Preface 



IX 



of the arena of educational combat into the field of 
labor where the flowers grow by the wayside, and 
who love also to rise at times out of the working 
valley of humble detail on to the mountain-top of 
exalted vision ; and I have not been forgetful either 
of those careful students of education, whether lay- 
men or expert, who are always looking for under- 
lying principles. Enough theory will be found here, 
I trust, to illumine practice, and only so much; 
enough practice, too, to give weight to theory. Some 
readers may find, I fear, as Kant said, that my book 
would have been shorter if it had not been so short, 
for I have attempted to pack paragraphs with thought, 
and not to pad pages with paragraphs. 

The book itself is the result of a course of lectures 
first given in the Dartmouth Summer School, 1900; 
later to my students in the Graduate Department of 
Pedagogy in Dartmouth College ; also in the Summer 
School of the University of North Carolina, 1903 ; 
and, finally, in the Harvard Summer School of The- 
ology, 1903. The cordial hearing given these lec- 
tures, which I here gratefully acknowledge, leads me 
to hope that the book as now in part rewritten and 
extended will still prove of service both to old and 
new friends. To prevent disappointment, let it be 
plainly said here in advance to the busy and practical 
superintendent and teacher (though, perhaps, pace 
tud, you most of all need its message), the volume is 
not another manual of practice, but an interpretation ; 



X Preface 

it would give not rules, but insight. The work of the 
teacher, too often a temporary drudgery to the woman 
until marriage, and to the man until a more remu- 
nerative proffer in other employments, and too often 
to their fellows a belittling occupation, will become 
ennobled in the eyes of all only as we become con- 
scious of the foundational place education occupies 
in our world. 

As to personal confessions and indulgences craved, 
I beg to say that upon the fields of biology and 
physiology in Chapters II and III I am a trespasser, 
entering here, as I do, not at all as a natural scientist, 
but as one who in the study of mind and its mean- 
ing comes upon its physical foundations. I hope for 
a welcome here by my fellow-workers beyond my 
hedge in the interest of inter-departmental courtesy, 
even as I am grateful for having entered into their 
labors. 

My psychology is the kind familiar since Kant, 
that considers the unity of mind in its threefold 
diversity of knowing, feeUng, and willing, though 
for some reasons it is now time to reconsider the 
ultimate phases of consciousness with a view to a 
new classification. Such a new classification appears 
in Professor Royce's recent " Outlines of Psychol- 
ogy." In Chapters VI and VII of my discussion the 
psychological results are from the rational, genetic, 
and social points of view combined. 

The philosophical system of the book, which I 



Preface 



XI 



have termed Idealistic Theism, appears in the final 
chapter as the necessary implication of the educa- 
tional process. It is also the presupposition of the 
whole discussion. The book is an application of 
this philosophy to perhaps the most important matter 
of human life, viz., the education of men and women. 
As Macaulay has observed, " The first business of a 
state is the education of its citizens." To this philo- 
sophical system itself, both in its purer exposition 
and in its fuller justification, I hope to return with 
the years as they bring the more philosophic mind. 
In reaching this insight for myself, my indebtedness 
is greatest to America's leading metaphysician, Pro- 
fessor Josiah Royce. 

My method of presentation, as those will recognize 
who know the book, or its author's method of lectur- 
ing, is derived, however faulty the imitation, from 
the "Science of Thought" of the lamented Dr. Ever- 
ett, — a book too little known by those writers and 
speakers who want to be logical. 

My own contribution to the definition of the con- 
ception of education will doubtless appear in a cer- 
tain large and systematic unity, herein introduced 
into the hitherto rather unshapen notion of what 
education is and means in human experience ; in the 
analysis of the spiritual environment of the pupil, 
together with the attempt to vindicate on sociological 
and psychological grounds the equal right of aesthetic, 
with physical, intellectual, and moral education, as 



Xll 



Preface 



contained in Chapters IV and V ; and in the induc- 
tion of the Kantian ideas of God, Freedom, and 
Immortality from educational, rather than ethical, 
facts, as presented in the final chapter. For these 
things I thank not myself, nor my stars, but my own 
teachers, both the quick and the dead, who have 
made them possible. 

To the educational masters, from Socrates to Eliot, 
my indebtedness appears on every page, but, rather 
than cumber the pages with many foot-notes, and at 
the same time to make the bibliographies most help- 
ful, I have gathered the references together at the 
end of each discussion. 

My hearty thanks are hereby rendered my col- 
league, Mr. F. C. Lewis, for assisting me with the 
proofs and giving many valuable suggestions and 
references. 

Hanover, New Hampshire, 
September 2, 1903. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

Introduction: The Field of Education 

PAGE 

1. The Agencies of Civilization i 

2. The Mottoes of Growth 4 

3. Broad and Narrow Conceptions of Education ... 5 

4. Points of View in the Study of Education .... 7 

(i) The History of Education 7 

(2) The Science of Education ...... 8 

(3) The Practice of Education il 

(4) The Philosophy of Education 1 1 

5. Field of this Inquiry 13 

6. Division of the Field . . . . . . . .14 

CHAPTER II 

The Biological Aspect of Education 

1. The Biological Facts significant for Education . . . 19 

2. The Increasing Size of the Mammalian Cerebrum ... 19 

(1) Its Significance 20 

(2) The Advantage of Educability over Instinct . . 24 

(3) The Mental Basis of Natural Selection ... 27 

(4) Biology and Education 28 

(5) Nature and Nurture 29 

3. The Prolonged Period of Human Infancy .... 30 

(i) Its Final Cause 31 

(2) Its Significance 32 

4. The Brain as the Organ of the Mind 34 

(1) History 34 

(2) Proof 35 

(3) Significance .36 

(4) What can Education do for the Brain ? ... 41 

xiii 



xiv Contents 

PAGE 

5. Is Automatism the End of Education ? 48 

6. First Definition of Education 52 

7. Educational Consequences of the Biological Point of View . 53 

CHAPTER III 
The Physiological Aspect of Education 

1. The Place of the Body in Education 57 

2. The Questions that concern Physical Education • . • 59 

3. The Influence of the Body on the Mind .... 59 

(i) How effected 59 

(2) The Physiology of Habit 62 

(3) Psychosis and Neurosis 63 

(4) The Degree of Mental Efficiency .... 64 

(5) The Influence of Mind on Body 67 

4. The Attention the Body should receive 67 

(i) Mental Work 68 

(2) Brain Rest 68 

(3) Respect for the Limits of Brain Capacity ... 69 

(4) Study of the Physical Child 71 

5. The Attention the Body is receiving 72 

(1) Manual Training ........ 73 

(2) Play 74 

(3) Gymnastics 81 

(4) Athletics 83 

6. The History of Physical Education 91 

7. Second Definition of Education 95 

CHAPTER IV 

The Sociological Aspect of Education 



1. The Nature of the Pupil's Environment . 

2. The Method of his Adjustment thereto . 

3. Education and Sociology 

4. The Questions of the Sociological Discussion 

5. The Elements of the Spiritual Environment 

6. The Nature of the Intellectual Environment 

(i) What is Matter? .... 
(2) What is Mind? .... 



97 

99 
100 

lOI 
lOI 

103 
103 
105 



Contents 



XV 



(3) The Classification of the Sciences 

(4) The Relation of Science and Art 

(5) The Educational Value of Science 

7. The Nature of the Emotional Environment 

(i) The Nature of Beauty 

(2) The List of the Arts . 

(3) The Nature of Religion 

(4) The Educational Value of Art . 

8. The Nature of the Volitional Environment 

(i) The List of the Volitions . 

(2) The Nature of History 

(3) Is History a Science? 



PAGE 
107 
1 10 
112 
117 
117 
118 
123 
127 
130 

135 



CHAPTER V 

The Sociological Aspect of Education {concluded') 

(4) The Nature of Constitutions 138 

(5) The Nature of Law . ... . , . 139 

(6) The Nature of Morality 140 

(7) The Educational Value of the Volitions , . . 142 
9. Education as Participation in Racial Experience . . . 145 

10. Third Definition of Education 150 

11. The Social Effects of Education 150 

(i) The Conservation of the Past 15 1 

(2) The Preservation of the Present .... 152 

{a) The Attitude of Founders of Society . '153 

{F) Education and Crime 154 

(f) Social Demand and Educational Supply . .158 

(3) The Progress of the Future 160 

12. Educational Consequences from the Sociological Point of 

View 164 



CHAPTER VI 

The Psychological Aspect of Education 

1. Education Psychologically considered . 

2. The Questions of the Psychological Discussion 

3. The Notion of Self-activity 



169 
170 
170 



XVI 



Contents 



4. The Insufficiency of Rational Psychology 

5. Educational Services of the Newer Psychology 

6. Internal Ways of Mental Development 

7. Three Additional Ways of Mental Development 

(i) Imitation 

{a) The Nature of Imitation . 

Id) The Effects of Imitation . 

(c) The Educational Uses of Imitation 
(2) Interest 

(a) The Nature of Interest . 

((5) The Importance of Interest 



(3) 



(0 
Effort 



The Art of securing Interest . 
Herbart's Doctrine of Interest and Will 



The Nature of Effort 

The Importance of Effort 
(<:) The Place of Effort in Education 
(d) The Mutuahty of Effort and Interest 



172 

173 
174 

175 
175 
176 
177 

183 
187 
188 
191 
194 
197 
198 
199 
200 
201 
203 



CHAPTER VII 



The Psychological Aspect of Education (concluded) 

8. The Notion of Self-development 207 

(i) The Presupposition of Time ..... 207 

(2) The Potential and the Actual . . . . . 208 

(3) The Stages of Mental Growth 209 

(^a) Childhood 209 

(d) Youth 215 

(c) Manhood 218 

9. Some Things Education is not 220 

ID. The Use of the Stages of Mental Growth in Educating . 222 

11. The Qualities of an Educated Mind 226 

12. The Psychological Ideal of Education 240 

13. The Nature of Culture 242 

14. A Liberal Education 244 

15. Fourth Definition of Education 251 

16. Other Definitions of Education 251 



Contents xvii 

CHAPTER VIII 
The Philosophical Aspeci of Education 

PAGE 

1. The Method of Philosophy 257 

2. The Question of the Philosophy of Education . . . 258 

3. Two Preliminary Generalizations 259 

4. The Implications of Education 263 

(i) The Origin of Man 263 

(2) The Nature of Man 273 

(3) The Destiny of Man 280 

5. Fifth Definition of Education 285 



THE 
PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION : THE FIELD OF EDUCATION 

There are five great agencies of civilization which i. The Agen-"^ 
conserve the past, preserve the present, and make zatLn^^^^^" 
possible a progressive future. These agencies are 
the home, the school, the vocation, the state, and the ' 
church. The home is the basic unit of civilization, in 
which appear in latent form all the powers that later 
life is to realize. 'The school was first in the home, 
and by growth became a separate institution as an 
extension of the home. The teacher is still said to 
stand in loco parentis. The vocation is made possible 
through the enlargement of personal power that 
takes place in the home and the school. The plying 
of one's vocation safely and justly necessitates the 
state. And underneath this whole procession of in- 
stitutions, giving immortal significance to each and 
all, is the church. Thus the agencies of civilization 
are organically related. 

Each of these agencies, too, discovers the social 
nature of man, revealing him as they do in a series 
of widening relationships with other beings. In the 
home the child stands in relation to father, mother, 



2 The Philosophy of Education 

brothers, and sisters. In the school the youth stands 
in relation to teachers and fellow-pupils. In his voca- 
tion man stands in relation to fellow-laborers. In 
the state man stands in relation to his fellow-citizens 
under the law. And in the church man stands in 
relation to the ideal Person, to God, — the widest re- 
lationship possible to man. 

Each of these institutions of society is based upon 
an underlying idea which explains their service to civ- 
ilization, and which justifies their existence. In the 
home it is the idea of obedience which is fundamental, 
and which becomes the habit of the child's life. This 
habit of the ready surrender of self to the standards 
of a righteous and loving authority is permanently 
desirable in a solid social fabric. To obey is better 
than sacrifice. This fundamental virtue is the con- 
tribution of the home to society and civilization. 

The underlying idea of the school, which explains 
the school and justifies its existence, is development; 
development of the body as the fit mediurn of expres- 
sion for the mind, development of the mind as the fit 
governor of the body and as embodying rational ends 
in itself. The school does for the child what the 
aeons of past time have done for the race, — develops 
its body and mind. 

The underlying idea of the business world, in which 
each man follows his vocation and justifies his exist- 
ence by the sweat of his brow, is the interdependence 
of the sons of earth. No civilized man produces all 
he needs in order to live, nor consumes all of what 
he himself produces. The members of the business 
world, as they follow their vocations, daily enter into 



Introduction 3 

each other's labors. Each man is both a producer 
and consumer, producing one thing that is necessary 
for many lives, and exchanging it for many things 
necessary for his own life. The world of one's voca- 
tion emphasizes the unity, the solidarity, the interde- 
pendence, of man and man. 

The underlying idea of the state is justice, suum 
cuique^ to each man his own, the return of the deed 
on the doer, whether it be protection for his con- 
formity to the law or punishment for his violation of 
the law. The state is the impartial judge, rewarding 
every man according to his deed. Justice is the 
foundation of the structure of human society. The 
** Republic " of Plato is the first great discussion, and 
one of the final great discussions, of the ideal state. 
Already it was recognized that the theme of justice, 
which is one of the titles of the dialogue, is in all its 
ramifications the theme of the state. To the modern 
Platonist, Hegel, the state is also, in the political 
organization of society, the final revelation of the 
eternal Idea. Jt is in the ministrations of the state 
that man becomes uniquely conscious of that which 
is just. 

And the underlying idea of the church, in which 
man comes into his widest consciousness through 
relationship to God, is righteousness, the doing of the 
will of the supreme Person upon the earth, the trans- 
formation of the kingdoms of earth into the kingdom 
of heaven, the addition of love and mercy to law and 
justice. The church is the perpetual prophet of the 
ideal to human society, winning the attention of men 
away from the things that are to the things that 



4 The Philosophy of Education 

ought to be. In the church society becomes most 
profoundly conscious of its inherent unrealized powers 
of righteous attainment, and man of his infinitude. 

It is the natural destiny of every man to receive 
successively these continually widening views of his 
nature, i Man comes into the fulness of his growth 
and into the final consciousness of himself through 
these elements of his social environment. \ Only by 
subjecting himself to them and learning their lessons 
and habituating his conduct to their ideas can he rise 
through them to the full measure of his own self-con- 
sciousness. 'The mottoes of spiritual growth are 
three. In childhood, in the institution of the home, 
the child must be another, imitate others, obey others. 
He can become himself only by first subjecting him- 
self, all unconsciously or with effort, to others. In 
the school, which compasses the adolescent period, the 
youth must be himself, develop his powers, become 
all his nature permits, and gain the sense of his indi- 
viduality and independence as a man. And in the 
business, state, and church worlds, during the period 
of manhood, he must find himself in the service of 
others, must make himself a contributor to the life of 
society, and must find his self by losing it. .First 
obey, then become, then contribute — these are the 
natural stages of self-realization as indicated by the 
social institutions. 

It is a familiar thought to-day that the physical 
organs of man, to be understood, must be viewed 
against the background of lower animal life. It is a 
less familiar thought, but equally true, that the activi- 
ties of man as expressed in the social agencies of 



Introduction 5 

, civilization must likewise be viewed against this back- 
ground of lower animal life. The home, the school, 
the vocation, the state, and the church are due to 
traits in man which are found also in simpler form in 
the lower animals. They mate, build homes, teach 
their young by example, form social communities, 
have leaders of flocks and herds, and become attached 
to higher beings who are good to them and upon 
whom they depend. The unique thing about man 
is not his uniqueness, but his comprehensiveness. 
In him the lower animal life finds its fulfilment. 
Through his highly developed powers of abstraction, 
imagination, and reason, only intimations of which 
the lower animals possess, man is enabled to carry on 
to greater fruition the immanent ends of existence. 
Through these institutions, taking up and adding to 
his animal heritage, man grows, and finds himself like 
a noble oak, which, in subjection to natural law, grows 
into its own likeness, and then both shelters and 
delights the sons of men. Only in the man these , 
stages of growth are conscious as he subjects himself 
in obedience, as he finds himself in development, and 
as he gives himself in service. 

This review of those natural social influences that 3. Broad and 
come upon and shape the life of man lead to two ^pt[ons of°' 
resulting conceptions of education, a broad and a Education, 
narrow one. Broadly speaking, the whole of life is an 
education, and life itself, in all its phases, is the great 
school. Not a situation in life but leaves its influence 
on the individual. Every agency of civilization is an 
education. From this point of view education becomes 
the resultant upon the individual of the sum total of 



6 The Philosophy of Education 

the influences of life. Every human situation is an 
educational situation, in which we grow from less to 
more. The significance of past time, so far as organic 
life is concerned, is found in the present stage of 
development and attainment of mankind. The mean- 
ing of the manifold present will be spelt in that larger 
future situation to which the present is but the ante- 
chamber. The human race itself as a whole is being 
educated under the tutelage of the Infinite Spirit, 
both in nature and in man, for a destiny greater, 
both in time and eternity, than it can imagine. This 
is the broadest conception it is possible to hold con- 
cerning education, in which living is itself learning, 
and life is itself the school, and the Spirit of the 
world himself the teacher. 

But, narrowly, education is the influence exerted 
by the school, technically so called, upon the indi- 
vidual. The school is the institution which appoints 
to itself the task of developing into fulness of self- 
consciousness and power the members of the race. 
The other institutions of society educate incidentally 
in the natural performance of their functions : the 
school educates with set purpose ; it intends to do 
what it can to put the plastic element in society, its 
youth, into full possession of itself and into full con- 
sciousness of its social relations and duties. The 
school, in this sense, embraces the whole educational 
system as a unit, from kindergarten, through primary 
and secondary grades, college, university, and profes- 
sional schools. These all work together as one for the 
making of a man both powerful and efficient, and the 
educational house should not be divided against itself. 



Introduction 7 

The study of education may be undertaken from 4- Points of 
either the broad point of view, as above defined, or study of 
the narrow. From the former point of view the study Education. 
of education is the study of civilization in its entirety. 
With this aspect of the subject the present inquiry 
will have nothing further to do, confining itself 
rather to the nature of the education which it is the 
function of the school to give. But even this field 
for our present purpose will have to be narrowed 
further. 

There are four points of view from which the study 
of education, in the narrow sense of the term, may 
be profitably undertaken. Education has a history, 
an ideal, a practice, and a philosophy. The educa- 
tional ideal, as defined by the normative science of 
education, is an outgrowth of educational history. 
Educational practice is the attempt to incorporate 
the educational ideal. And the philosophy of educa- 
tion is the attempt to find the meaning of the whole 
educational process as it takes shape in history, 
ideals, and practice. Thus the philosophy of educa- 
tion would give the inclusive truth which the preced- 
ing points of view indicate. Let us briefly define 
each of these four points of view, viz., the history, the 
science, the practice, and the philosophy of education. 

The historical point of view asks the question, (i) The 
What has education been in the past .^ The answer JJ^^toryof 

^ Education. 

is given from the standpoint of the history of civili- 
zation, education being both an effect and a cause 
of a nation's manner of life. The answer considers 
both those educational systems that have controlled 
a nation's life, being also controlled by it, and those 



8 The Philosophy of Education 

educational reformers, who, like Goldsmith's village 
preacher — 

"... tried each art, reproved each dull delay, 
Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way." 

The historical consideration of education begins 
with the Orient and treats of the educational sys- 
tems and ideals of the ancient nations, China, India, 
Persia, Israel, Phoenicia, and Egypt ; then the classi- 
cal nations of Greece and Italy ; then the early 
church and Middle Age education, followed by mod- 
ern education, since the Renascence ; and finally, 
the contemporary educational systems of the lead- 
ing countries of the world. Such an historical study 
discloses education as a growing body of theory and 
practice, as a process of evolution in the system of 
instruction become conscious of itself. The origin 
and growth of the body under the laws of nature 
was a process of unconscious evolution ; the develop- 
ment of the body and mind under the nurturing 
influence of the school is a process of conscious evo- 
lution. As a resultant of historic forces the educa- 
tional ideal is defined. 

Second, the scientific point of view in the treat- 
ment of education is the attempt to say what edu- 
cation ought to be, to define the educational ideal, 
to reduce the art of education to a science. In the 
well-known phrase of Professor Jevons, an art teaches 
us to do, and a science to know. The teacher, or edu- 
cator, is doing something; the pupil, as he becomes 
educated, is doing something. Education is doing; 
it is an art. But is this art conscious of its basis ? 



Introduction 9 

Are there universally valid principles which under- 
lie this art, as anatomy and physiology underlie the 
practice of medicine ? The science of education 
attempts to answer these questions, to discover the 
theoretic basis upon which the art of education rests. 

The questions of the science of education are two, 
namely, What is the nature of the body and mind to 
be educated ? And how, in the light of their nature, 
ought this education to proceed ? The answer to the 
first question the science of education seeks in the 
sciences of physiology, psychology, logic, aesthetics, 
ethics, and sociology. Physiology reveals the nature 
of the body. Psychology reveals the nature of the 
mind when analyzed into its elements, and explained 
through its physiological relations with the body and 
brain. Logic is the science of the knowing function 
of the mind, as aesthetics is the science of the feeling 
function, and ethics is the science of the willing 
function. Sociology is the science of man in organ- 
ized groups. These are the sciences that underlie 
the art of education. 

The answer to the second question of the science 
of education, namely, how, in the light of their nature, 
ought the body and mind to be educated, is now in 
process of making. It is the new question in educa- 
tional history that originated with Herbart. It is 
the question of method, or the right way of doing a 
thing. It is being answered in tentative fashion, for 
the making of a man is no simple matter, by the phys- 
ical culturists, the applied psychologists, like James 
and Dewey, the normal schools, the summer schools 
for teachers, and the pedagogical departments of the 



lo The Philosophy of Education 

colleges and universities, together with the growing 
and for the most part undigested literature on the 
methods of teaching. 

The question of the right way of teaching needs to 
be dignified in the sight of our most capable and 
prominent educators. In his inaugural address in 
1869, reviewing the increase in knowledge of the 
modern centuries, President Eliot was led to say, 
"The actual problem to be solved is not v/hat to 
teach, but how to teach." Likewise there is no 
fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam in quoting 
from Talleyrand, ^^ Les methodes sont les maitres des 
maitres'^ The study of method in teaching is but the 
study of the best way of doing what must be done in 
some way. And Dr. Arnold of Rugby has well re- 
minded us, " It is clear that in whatever it is our duty 
to act, those matters also it is our duty to study." 
The use of method in teaching is seeing that the sub- 
ject-matter taught is realized in the experience of the 
pupil. Without this result, teaching and learning 
are mechanical ; with it, they are vital. But those who 
set about determining the method of education to- 
day must look, not as they are tempted, to psychol- 
ogy alone, but to that group of related sciences 
defined above, one of which is psychology, and which 
together define the physical, mental, and social nature 
of the being to be educated. Education is primarily 
an art ; it can become a science only as it grounds 
itself upon universal principles, applicable to all indi- 
viduals alike, deduced from the sciences of man, the 
educable being. 

In the third place, education in the narrow sense 



Introduction 1 1 

of the term may be studied from the practical point (3) The 
of view, viz., from that point of view which considers Education 
the practice of education, the execution of the ideal 
of education, as defined by history and science, 
through the agencies of school boards, superinten- 
dents, parents, teachers, and pupils, working together 
with books and apparatus in buildings and fields. 
This point of view has to do with the mechanical 
and the vital environment of the educational process, 
with the conditions in relation to which education 
becomes an accomplished fact. The problems of the 
practical point of view are three, viz., (i) how to 
organize a school or school system ; (2) how to man- 
age, in which the question of discipline is uppermost ; 
and (3) how to supervise. Under the practice of 
education are involved all questions of school hygiene, 
incentives, work, play, offence, discipline, punish- 
ment, and the improvement of teachers. In no par- 
ticular has American education been weaker than 
in these practical matters, and no educational sign 
to-day carries more hope with it than the widely 
growing recognition of their importance. 

Finally, in the fourth place, after the history, the (4) The 
science, and the practice of education, one raises the of^Education 
fundamental inquiry as to the meaning of the whole 
educational process. Does this education, which 
occupies so large a proportion of the human history 
that is worth remembering and repeating, whose 
ideal it is so difficult to define, whose practice en- 
gages the best service of the best minds of civilized 
society, and consumes annually incredible amounts 
of public money, — does this education mean any- 



12 The Philosophy of Education 

thing significant for human happiness, progress, and 
destiny ? What ? Does education imply anything 
as to the final truth of man and his world ? In brief, 
what is the meaning of education ? That is the ques- 
tion which it is the function of the philosophy of 
education to answer. That answer must give unity 
to the truths of the preceding points of view. It 
must locate education in the economy of our universe. 
The masterpiece in the literature of this aspect of 
the subject of education has been, since its publica- 
tion in 1848, Rosenkranz' '' Philosophy of Education," 
written in the spirit of Hegel. The problems of the 
philosophy of education are divided by Rosenkranz 
into three, viz., (i) Education in its General Idea; 

(2) Education in its Special Elements, including 
physical, intellectual, and volitional training ; and 

(3) Education in its Particular Systems, being an 
historical review, from the standpoint of Hegel's 
"Phenomenology of Spirit," of the world's systems 
of education. 

The volume of Herbert Spencer on " Education," 
published in America in 1861, has been one of the 
most widely read and influential of the books on edu- 
cation of the last half-century. He raises the ques- 
tion, " What knowledge is of most worth } " and 
discusses the nature of intellectual, moral, and physi- 
cal education. 

These two discussions of Rosenkranz and Spencer, 
as do almost all of the theoretical treatises on the na- 
ture of education, omit entirely the consideration of 
the nature of aesthetic education. The education 
of the emotions, ending in the appreciative sense of 



Introduction 13 

the beautiful, is an unwritten chapter in educational 
theory. The explanation of this omission is doubt- 
less the late recognition, beginning with Rousseau, 
accorded the feelings as real elements of psychic life. 
But there is no excuse for this omission from the 
point of view, either of the importance of the emo- 
tions in life, or of their fundamental place in the 
structure of body and mind of the individual. A 
new philosophy of education must supply this lack. 

Such are the four points of view in their mutual 5. Field of 
interdependence that may be utilized in the study This inquiry. 
of the education of the school. Now, what are the 
self-imposed limits of the present task } Passing by 
the history, the science, and the practice of educa- 
tion, our sole present inquiry concerns the answer 
to the last-named question, viz.. What is education.? 
What, from a fundamental point of view, is the nature 
and meaning of education .? What is the philoso- 
phy of education ? In the answer to this question, 
if true, the history, the science, and the practice of 
education will find satisfaction. 

In any inquiry which attempts to be ultimate, to 
go to the bottom of a matter, which is the essential 
characteristic of philosophic thinking, two questions 
must be asked and answered. The first is, What are 
the facts in the case under consideration ? The sec- 
ond is. What is their meaning .? Both the dream and 
the interpretation thereof is expected in a philosophic 
investigation. The present inquiry, in so far as it 
concerns itself with the facts of education, will take 
us far afield into the related natural, social, and men- 
tal sciences, will occupy most of our attention, and 



of the Field. 



14 The Philosophy of Education 

will furnish us with the data for the final answer 
to our question, What is education ? This part of the 
inquiry may be called empirically philosophical, and 
comprises the following six chapters of the book. 
For the second question, What is the ultimate mean- 
ing of the educational process ? the only method of 
answer is that of following out into some final form 
the suggestions, the intimations, the implications, of 
our present collected, though fragmentary, group of 
educational facts. This method may be called the 
purely philosophic, and the answer that it affords to 
our question is attempted in the last chapter of the 
book. 
6. Division It must always be remembered that the term 
educatio7i is abstract, that education itself does not 
exist except as a concept of the mind, that the con- 
crete existent thing is always some being or beings 
educated or to be educated. The educable being, the 
individual child, — he is the concrete thing with 
which our discussion has to do. The nature of man, 
as the subject for education, determines the nature 
of education, and suggests the lines of inquiry in 
our chosen field. When we ask concerning the nature 
of man, the being to be educated, we are confronted 
by an old and new view. Man, in his isolation and 
remoteness from the world of nature and animals, 
has been sufficiently emphasized in the generations 
hitherto. It is the growing habit of our own genera- 
tion to consider man in his integrity with the remain- 
der of creation. The conception of the unity of the 
world of creatures has been brought into clear con- 
sciousness through the method and the doctrine of 



Introduction 15 

evolution. This point of view characterizes the 
thinking of the latter half of the nineteenth century. 
It has been widely applied to various data of thought, 
as religion and theology, society, philosophy, and 
history, outside of its chosen domain of natural 
science, and with uniformly suggestive results. It 
remains, among other possible applications, to apply 
the conception of evolution to the theory of the 
nature of education. The following inquiry has at- 
tempted to throw what light evolution can give upon 
the subject of education. 

Adopting the new view that considers man in the 
perspective of his historic background, in his integrity 
with the remainder of creation, we may note four com- 
mon possessions that he shares with the lower animal 
world ; viz., he possesses life, his life takes shape in a 
physical form, he goes in groups with his fellows, and 
he has intelhgence. Life is the great fundamental fact ; 
with this we start. And life is always embodied in 
some form as its vehicle, hence the body as the bearer 
of life. And this life in physical form finds its com- 
pletion only- in other life similarly embodied ; hence 
the groupings of lives. And life in the body in com- 
panionship with other life needs conscious direction, 
and this is the function of intelligence. 

These common characteristics as shared by man 
differ prodigiously from themselves as shared by the 
lower animals, but not absolutely. Each of these 
characteristics is a field for special scientific research, 
and concerning each of them a body of knowledge 
has grown up using comparative methods of study. 
The knowledge of life is called biology, of the body 



1 6 The Philosophy of Education 

in which life takes form is physiology, of the group- 
ings of life is sociology, of the intelligence that 
directs life is psychology, and of the meaning of life 
is philosophy. 

Here, then, we have the outline of our inquiry. 
The nature of education, which is our quest, depends 
upon the nature of the man to be educated. What, 
then, have the essential sciences of man to say con- 
cerning our question, What is education } Biology, 
as the science of life in organic forms, ought to 
furnish a primary and elemental conception of educa- 
tion, whose function, as Spencer defines it, is to fit for 
complete living. Physiology, as the science of the 
function of the organs of the body, ought to be able 
to add conceptions of the first importance concerning 
the education of the body, without which any succeed- 
ing education is baseless. Sociology, as the science 
of society, of men in organized masses, ought to 
enlarge still further our conception of that educa- 
tion which socializes the individual and makes of him 
a desirable member of human society. Psychology, 
as the science that describes and explains mental 
phenomena, that analyzes and gives causes for mental 
states, ought to show the effect upon the mind of 
that education which aims to develop the power of 
mind and train to efficiency its natural capacities. 
And finally, philosophy, as the science that attempts 
to unify experience into some systematic and self- 
explaining whole, ought to be able to indicate whether 
education is a superficial excrescence on human life, or 
whether it is fundamental in the structure of things 
and possessive of deep-lying impUcations concerning 



Introduction 17 

that which is invisible and eternal. The answer to 
our single inquiry gives us, then, the pain of seeking 
it through the finite facts of our human experience, 
and finally into the transcendent world which our 
present fragmentary experience suggests but does 
not yet compass. In consequence, let us consider — 

(i) The Biological Aspect of Education. 

(2) The Physiological Aspect of Education. 

(3) The Sociological Aspect of Education. 

(4) The Psychological Aspect of Education. 

(5) The Philosophical Aspect of Education. 

REFERENCES ON THE INTRODUCTION 

Barnett, Teaching and Organization. 

Compayre, History of Pedagogy. 

Davidson, History of Education.. 

De Garmo, Essentials of Method. 

Dewey, The School and Society. 

Eliot, Educational Reform. 

Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, Ch. 31. 

James, Briefer Psychology ; Talks to Teachers. 

McMurry, Elements of General Method ; The Conduct of the 
Recitation. , 

Munroe, The Educational Ideal. 

Painter, History of Education. 

Pickard, School Supervision. 

Reighard, The Biological Sciences and the People ; article in 
Science^ June 22, 1900. 

Rosenkranz, Philosophy of Education. 

Royce, Articles in Educational Review, Vols. I and VI. 

Shaw, School Hygiene. 

Spencer, Education. 

Starbuck, Psychology of Religion. 

Tompkins, School Management. 

Welton, The Logical Bases of Education. 

Williams, History of Modern Education. 
c 



CHAPTER II 
THE BIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF EDUCATION 

There is a natural human prejudice against con- 
sidering man as an animal. This prejudice is doubt- 
less due to many centuries of emphasis upon himself 
as the lord of creation and to corresponding centuries 
of ignorance of the nature and intelligence of ani- 
mals. This prejudice, as such, is ill-founded; but it 
serves a good purpose as a warning against taking 
man as a mere animal, against that position which 
expects little of man because of his underlying ani- 
mal nature. Man is not a mere animal, nor even a 
mere man. An animal is not a mere animal, but, like 
man, has affinities in his nature with those beings 
that come both before and after him. The creation 
is one from lowest matter to highest mind, and noth- 
ing occupying a place in this creation is merely itself. 
In considering the biological aspect of education, let 
the prejudice, then, against considering the original 
animal likenesses of man be laid. That for which this 
prejudice rightly stands will receive its meed in the 
later discussions. 

Biological problems underlie educational problems. 
They deal with life in its adjustment to its environ- 
ment. Indeed, Herbert Spencer, one of the first, in 
time and importance, of the modern students of or- 

i8 



The Biological Aspect of Education 19 

ganic and vital problems, claims that life consists in 
the proper adjustment between the inner and the 
outer, in right correspondence to environment. The 
Promethean spark of life itself eludes as yet human 
search, but Spencer has rightly named one of the 
conditions of its manifestation. The same writer has 
told us most strongly that, 'fto prepare us for com- 
plete living is the function which education has to 
discharge." Manifestly biology as the science of life 
in its first and elemental manifestations has something 
to say to that education whose function it is to make 
life complete. 

There are three facts known to biology, and to The Facts of 
other sciences as well, which are sisfnificant for edu- B^°^ogy ^ig- 

' _ ° nificant for 

cation. These are, (i) the increasing size of the Education. 
cerebrum, or hemispheres of the brain, both abso- 
lutely and relatively to the size of the body, in the 
ascending scale of mammals ; (2) the prolonged period 
of human infancy in comparison with lower animals; 
and (3) the brain as the organ of the mind. 

Let us consider these biological facts in succes- The increas- 
sion in their bearing on education. And first, the Jjjfcg^^g^^ 
increasing size of the cerebrum in mammals. The brum in 
titanotherium, an extinct mammal of the Middle and Mammals. 
Lower Tertiary periods, a true rhinoceros, had cer- 
tainly not more than one-fifth of the cerebral nervous 
substance which is possessed by the living rhinoc- 
eros of to-day. Yet in bulk this creature was as 
large, if not larger, than the largest present rhinoc- 
eros. So again, as compared with the more ancient 
pithecoid genera, the more recent and related, 
though not in direct line of descent, genus Homo 



20 The Philosophy of Education 

has an immensely increased mass of cerebral tissue. 
Yet there is little difference of bodily structure. An 
ape's brain is 2^ the weight of its body; a human 
infant's brain, where the proportion is larger than at 
any time later in life, is ^ the weight of its body ; at 
three years old the brain of the human child is -^^ the 
weight of its body ; and in adult life the proportion 
has decreased to -^-^. This increase of the absolute 
size of the cerebrum in man in comparison with the 
collaterally related pithecoids accounts for the fact 
that the ape and the lowest type of man differ in in- 
tellectual range far more from each other than the 
lowest and highest types of man. In fact, with the 
exception of the whale and the elephant, man has 
absolutely the largest brain of all the creatures. An 
ox of a ton's weight has a smaller brain than a man 
of a hundred weight. 

This increasing size of the cerebrum, as one ascends 
in the scale of existence, is characteristic not only of 
the mammals, but also of the reptiles, which preceded 
the mammals in temporal origin. A consideration of 
these facts leads Professor E. Ray Lankester to sum- 
marize the situation in these words, quoted from the 
highly suggestive article referred to in the list at the 
close of this chapter, " Recent forms have a greatly 
increased bulk of cerebrum, as compared with their 
early Tertiary or mesozoic forbears." And in general 
the fact probably is that in every class of the animal 
kingdom recent forms have a cerebral mass much 
larger than that of extinct forms. 
o-^__-^ _ Now here is a biological fact, which, it was asserted, 

has significance for education. What is this signifi- 



Significance. 



The Biological Aspect of Education 21 

canoe ? ' In looking for the meaning of the increased 
size of the cerebrum in mammals, the highest form of 
organic creature, it might be thought at first that the 
power of control of the body was thereby increased. 
Such, however, does not seem to be the case. The 
nerve centres of the ancient creature, though small, 
were sufficient to control his body. He lacked not so 
much the capacity to do with his body what he wished, 
as the capacity to frame the conception of what were 
good to do. The mouse to-day has more cerebrum 
than a lizard, but hardly controls its body better. 
The average male brain weighs forty-nine ounces as 
against the average female brain of forty-four ounces, 
yet man does not control his body even as gracefully 
as woman. 

The question recurs, then, as to the significance 
of the larger cerebral mass. Significance it has, and 
some purpose it serves, else it would not have been 
selected in the process of natural development. All 
experiments upon the brain to-day go to show that 
the function of the cerebral hemispheres is that of de- 
liberate action. The lower centres act automatically, 
from habit, and from immediate present stimuli ; the 
higher centres act with deliberation, in new ways, 
and in response to remote or future stimuli. It is 
the lower centres that receive and convey hereditary 
endowments of reflexes and instincts. It is the higher 
centres that arbitrate between competing instincts 
and that secure adjustment to novel situations. The 
increasing size of the cerebrum, of the higher centres, 
means, then, the transfer of life from the instinctive 
to the rational basis, means that the organism which 



22 The Philosophy of Education 

can act from remote, as well as from immediate, 
stimuli is at a distinct advantage in comparison with 
the organism that reacts only to immediate stimuli. 
The cerebrum is the reservoir of experience of the 
individual, whence he may draw considerate, and 
hence desirable, reactions to stimuli. It makes learn- 
ing possible, as an appendix to inherited instinct. 
Man, the highest of the mammals, has not fewer 
instincts than the lower animals, but he has a greater 
capacity than they, owing to his enlarged cerebral 
tissues, to delay reaction to stimuli, to learn from past 
experience, to adjust himself to new situations, and to 
form, in the course of his individual growth, new and 
delicate nervous reactions. An instinct is an inherited 
nervous mechanism which goes off, like an alarm 
clock, at the proper stimulus and moment. As the 
size of the cerebrum increases, the number of instincts 
do not decrease, but the creature becomes less and 
less dependent upon his instincts for survival and 
more and more dependent upon judicious selection 
among his instincts and upon what experience in his 
own individual case teaches. In the history of 
mammals the ability of the individual to learn has 
been a superinduced perfection upon the basis of 
racial instinct. In brief, the increased size of the 
cerebrum in mammalian fo7'ms signifies educability. 
The very possibility of receiving any education at all 
is due to the existence of the enlarged cerebral mass. 
This is the significance for education of the first 
of the three biological facts. 

A more discriminating statement of the evolution- 
ary way in which the hemispheres became the seat 



The Biological Aspect of Education 23 

of intelligent functioning is found in the following 
words of Professor William James : — 

"All nervous centres have then, in the first in- 
stance, one essential function, that of * intelligent ' 
action. They feel, prefer one thing to another, and 
have 'ends.' Like all other organs, however, they 
evolve from ancestor to descendant, and then evolu- 
tion takes two directions, the lower centres passing 
downwards into more unhesitating automatism, and 
the higher ones upwards into larger intellectuality. 

" Thus it may happen that those functions which 
can safely grow uniform and fatal become least ac- 
companied by mind, and that their organ, the spinal 
cord, becomes a more and more soulless machine ; 
whilst on the contrary those functions which it bene- 
fits the animal to have adapted to delicate environ- 
ing variations pass more and more to the hemispheres, 
whose anatomical structure and attendant conscious- 
ness grow more and more elaborate as zoological evo- 
lution proceeds. In this way, it might come about 
that in man and the monkeys the basal ganglia should 
do fewer things by themselves than they can do in 
dogs, fewer in dogs than in rabbits, fewer in rabbits 
than in hawks, fewer in hawks than in pigeons, fewer 
in pigeons than in frogs, fewer in frogs than in fishes, 
and that the hemispheres should correspondingly do 
more. This passage of functions forward to the ever 
enlarging hemispheres would be itself one of the evo- 
lutive changes, to be explained, like the development 
of the hemispheres themselves, either by fortunate 
variations or by inherited effects of use. The reflexes, 
on this view, upon which the education of our human 



24 The Philosophy of Education 

hemispheres depends, would not be due to the basal 
ganglia alone. They would be tendencies in the 
hemispheres themselves, modifiable by education, 
unlike the reflexes of the medulla oblongata, pons, 
optic lobes and spinal cord." ^ 

It would seem that in man alone of the mammals 
has the cerebrum developed to the extent of limitless 
educability. Certainly he is the most educable of 
the animals. Indeed, perhaps it is only through 
courtesy that we are permitted at all to speak of 
educated animals. Trained they certainly are through 
the processes of associative memory ; but educated, 
in the sense that they comprehend what they are 
about, and the meaning of the process, perhaps they 
are not. 
The An advantage of the combination of educability 

Advantage of ^^^ instinct ovcr instiuct alone is what we should 

Educability 

over Instinct, expcct from the fact that the combination has itself 
come to exist in the history of organic forms. The 
advantage is also obvious. Direction by instinct 
alone makes the creature an automaton, with predict- 
able reactions, and with little power of adaptation to 
varied conditions. Direction through learning, work- 
ing with and upon instinct, make the creature a 
person, with unpredictable conduct, and with great 
power of mental adaptation to varied conditions. The 
reaction due to an instinct is general and expressive 
of what unnumbered ancestors have done in similar 
situations ; it is unconsidered. The action due to 
education is specific and expressive of the need 
of the moment ; it is considered. Education means 

1 James, " Principles of Psychology," Vol. I, pp. 79 <?/ se^. 



The Biological Aspect of Education 25 

that the judgment of the individual is added to the 
past experience of the race in the determination of 
conduct. It means that the elaboration of the new 
is added to the transmission of the old. Conscious 
rapid progress, dependent upon the insight of the in- 
dividual, in contrast with unconscious slow progress, 
dependent upon the experience of the race, becomes 
possible. 

On the advantage of educability over instinct, I 
cannot do better than refer again to the admirable 
language of Professor James, as follows : " In the 
human race, where our opportunities for observation 
are the most complete, we seem to have no evidence 
whatever which would support the hypothesis, [the 
inheritance of acquired characteristics] unless it pos- 
sibly be the law that city-bred children are more apt 
to be near-sighted than country children. In the 
mental world we certainly do not observe that the 
children of great travellers get their geography lessons 
with unusual ease, or that a baby whose ancestors have 
spoken German for thirty generations will, on that ac- 
count, learn Italian any the less easily from its Italian 
nurse. But if the considerations we have been led to 
are true, they explain perfectly well why this law 
should not be verified in the human race, and why, 
therefore, in looking for evidence on the subject, we 
should confine ourselves exclusively to lower animals. 
In them fixed habit is the essential and characteristic 
law of nervous action. The brain grows to the exact 
modes in which it has been exercised, and the inheri- 
tance of these modes — then called instincts — would 
have in it nothing surprising. But in man the nega- 



26 The Philosophy of Education 

tion of all fixed modes is the essential characteristic. 
He owes his whole preeminence as a reasoner, his 
whole human quality of intellect, we may say, to the 
facility with which a given mode of thought in him 
may suddenly be broken up into elements, which re- 
combine anew. Only at the price of inheriting no 
settled instinctive tendencies is he able to settle every 
novel case by the fresh discovery by his reason of 
novel principles. He is, par excellence, the educable 
animal. If, then, the law that habits are inherited 
were found exemplified in him, he would, in so far 
forth, fall short of his human perfections ; and when 
we survey the human races, we actually do find that 
those which are most instinctive at the outset are 
those which, on the whole, are least educated in the 
end. An untutored Italian is, to a great extent, a 
man of the world ; he has instinctive perceptions, ten- 
dencies to behavior, reactions, in a word, upon his 
environment which the untutored German wholly 
lacks. If the latter be not drilled, he is apt to be a 
thoroughly loutish personage ; but, on the other hand, 
the mere absence in his brain of definite innate ten- 
dencies enables him to advance by the development, 
through education, of his purely reasoned thinking, 
into complex regions of consciousness that the Italian 
may probably never approach. 

" We observe an identical difference between men 
as a whole and women as a whole. A young woman 
of twenty reacts with intuitive promptitude and secu- 
rity in all the usual circumstances in which she may 
be placed. Her likes and dislikes are formed ; her 
opinions, to a great extent, the same that they will be 



The Biological Aspect of Education 27 

through life. Her character is, in fact, finished in its 
essentials. How inferior to her is a boy of twenty in 
all these respects ! His character is still gelatinous, 
uncertain what shape to assume, * trying it on ' in 
every direction. Feeling his power, yet ignorant of 
the manner in which he shall express it, he is, when 
compared with his sister, a being of no definite con- 
tour. But this absence of prompt tendency in his 
brain to set into particular modes is the very condi- 
tion which insures that it shall ultimately become so 
much more eflficient than the woman's. The very 
lack of preappointed trains of thought is the ground 
on which general principles and heads of classifica- 
tion grow up ; and the masculine brain deals with 
new and complex matter indirectly by means of these 
in a manner which the feminine method of direct 
intuition, admirably and rapidly as it performs within 
its limits, can vainly hope to cope with." ^ 

For the transmission of instinct or old brain The Mental 
mechanism, only a comparatively small amount of ^^^^^°[ 
cerebral tissue was necessary ; for the possibility of Selection, 
education, or the formation of new brain mechanism, 
a much larger amount of cerebral tissue is necessary. 
The necessary size of the cerebrum, known as a bio- 
logical fact, would seem to indicate that in all verte- 
brates there has been a continual tendency to impose 
educability upon instinct. Because of the accruing 
advantage, those forms with the smaller brains were 
unfitted to survive in the struggle for existence with 
brains of increasing size. Whence it appears that the 
brain, following after the general bodily structure, 
^ James, " Principles of Psychology," Vol, II, pp. 367 et seq. 



28 The Philosophy of Education 

J 

V and during an enormous period and gradual develop- 

ment, is the last organ of selection, and evolution 
begins to proceed on the mental instead of the hith- 
erto physical basis of selection. Thus education from 
the biological point of view cannot be regarded as a 
superficial impingement upon the life of the organism, 
but as the very condition of its highest development 
and best adjustment to its environment. Education 
is not an unessential side-play in the world's drama 
of progress, but is written largely in the very consti- 
tution of a growing universe. Adaptation by mental 
power takes the place of adaptation by bodily struc- 
ture. The capacity of learning from experience and 
being taught in one's individual lifetime defeats the 
otherwise triumphant transformation of the organs of 
the body. To get food from trees, the giraffe develops 
a long neck, the elephant develops a trunk, the bear 
strength of body, the ape the ability to climb ; and man 
alone uses a ladder or an axe. Mind is an organ of supe- 
rior adjustment to environment. It is the most useful 
apparatus of the organism in keeping it from immediate 
reactions, in delaying action pending consideration, 
and in discovering new and better relations to sur- 
roundings. Man has not the bodily strength of the 
horse, nor the health of dogs, nor the age of whales, 
nor the endurance of the ox ; but he survives easily, 
nevertheless, because he has superior intelligence, 
the power of symbolic thinking. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes I think it is who says somewhere that the 
difference between i-F2 and ;r-t-/ is that between 
savagery and civilization. 

From the discussion as thus far adlvanced, on 



The Biological Aspect of Education 29 

the first of the biological facts that have signifi- Biology and 
cance for education, it is evident that instead of Education. 
antagonism there is really large coincidence between 
biological and educational points of view. Education 
can be helpfully defined, in the first instance, from 
the biological standpoint. Mind, which along with 
the body, is the subject of education, is a useful addi- 
tion to the organism. Education provides such con- 
ditions as enable men to react on the outer world 
in a useful way. By an intentional arrangement of 
stimuli, education produces such changes in the brain 
as insure safe later reactions upon the world. Bio- 
logically, education is the formation of suitable habits 
of reaction or stimuli. As Professor Adam Sedgwick 
says, " Education is nothing more than the response 
of the nearly mature organism to external stimuli 
. . . the penultimate response of the zygote to exter- 
nal stimuli, the ultimate being that of senile decay, 
which ends in natural death." ^ 

The lower animals and savages live under simple Nature and 
and comparatively unvarying conditions ; civilized ^^'^"^^• 
man lives under complex and rapidly varying condi- 
tions. What Nature unassisted can amply do for the 
former in their preparation for life, she cannot do for 
the latter. Education, as the coadjutor of Nature, 
provides man for reaction in a civilized community. 
And, as Nature is the kind mother of the lower crea- 
tion, so is the school, not destroying, but utilizing and 
transcending, the powers of Nature, the Alma Mater 
of civilization. What Nature could not do in that she 

1 Article in Science, June 8, 1900, "Variation and some Phenomena 
connected with Reproduction and Sex." 



30 The Philosophy of Education 



The 

Prolonged 
Period of 
Human 
Infancy. 



was weak through her bondage to the law of inherited 
habit, Education, making capital of the forces of Na- 
ture, and becoming itself a kind of Higher Nature, 
achieved in breaking those bonds asunder, and is be- 
come the potency of freer and more responsible living. 
The adjustment to environment which education can 
give is superior to that which the lower animals enjoy 
or to that which Nature unassisted can give to man. 
(The term Nature means here all the forces of life 
except those which man consciously [Rousseau would 
prefer to say, worse than uselessly] brings to bear in 
the amelioration and elevation of his own existence. 
It may be rightly said, however, that such effort on 
the part of man is itself a product of Nature, and is 
natural, and, in this sense of the word, education is 
itself one of the last and highest kinds of natural 
things. The term Nature is one of the worst abused 
in our language, and needs definition wherever used. 
The above discussion attempts to turn on ideas and is 
devoted to no particular terminology.) 

To recur, after a long interval, to our primal ques- 
tion, What is education } and to concrete the biological 
discussion as thus far advanced, it may be said in 
answer, that. Education is the superior adjustment of 
a human being to his environment. 

Now for our second biological fact. The period of 
human infancy is prolonged beyond that of any other 
creature. In the lowest organic forms birth is by 
partition of the parent, not by parturition. In such 
a case there is no infancy, no period of helpless de- 
pendence on the parent organism. As the mental 
life becomes more complex, and as the conditions of 



The Biological Aspect of Education 31 

this change, the period of infancy lengthens. In 
some of the higher vertebrates, both birds and mam- 
mals, the young cannot take care of themselves im- 
mediately after birth. This is particularly true of the 
anthropoid apes. At the age of a month, the young 
orang-outang is just beginning to learn to walk, 
whereas a monkey has already learned the use of 
hands and feet. The period of infancy in savage life 
is years longer than in any lower mammalian life, and 
in civilized life the years of infancy are extended, in 
the estimation of medical jurisprudence to seven 
years, in the eyes of the law to eighteen and twenty- 
one usually for female and male respectively, and, 
from the point of view of complete education, to a 
quarter of a century or more. During this greatly 
extended period those who are to live by the products 
of mental work are devoting themselves to developing 
productive efficiency, and remain more or less depend- 
ent upon parental or institutional support. The longer 
period of infancy of man as compared with woman, 
which fact is recognized in the legal distinction of the 
ages of freedom, is doubtless a kindred fact. 

What is the cause of lengthening infancy in organic The Final 
evolution ? As the situations of life become increas- p^^Q^J^^^Jg^j 
ingly complicated with the higher creatures, it becomes infancy. 
more and more difficult for all their desirable reactions 
to be organized at birth as instincts. Consequently 
the period of preparation for living is extended beyond 
birth or infancy, and education does consciously in 
infancy after birth what nature does unconsciously 
before birth. Infancy thus is a sign that the organ- 
ism possessing it has a complicated destiny. The 



32 The Philosophy of Education 

adjustments to his environment made by man are 
manifold more in number, more complex in kind, and 
more delicate in nature, than those made by the lower 
animals. Man's life being thus extremely varied and 
its situations so numerous, any one situation is not 
repeated as often as in the lower animal's monotonous 
life of hungering and hunting. Consequently Nature 
cannot fully prepare man in the pre-natal period for 
living, and all the adjustments, other than the instinc- 
tive ones, requiring, as they do, intelligence and rea- 
son, must be learned in the post-natal period. This 
learning is made possible, as the discussion of the 
first biological fact showed, through the increased 
efficiency of the brain in its cerebral hemispheres. 
To answer the question of this paragraph in brief, the 
cause of infancy is the necessity of adequate time for 
preparation for complex living. 
The Now, what is the significance for education of the 

oHnfan^cy!^ period of infancy? The lamented Professor John 
Fiske was original in his contribution of the doctrine 
of infancy to the theory of evolution. He discussed 
its significance for society as a whole and not simply 
for education as a social institution. "Infancy, 
psychologically considered," he says, "is the period 
during which the nerve connections and correlative 
ideal associations necessary for self-maintenance are 
becoming permanently established. . . . The in- 
creased complexity of psychical adjustments entailed 
the lengthening of the period required for organizing 
them ; the lengthening of infancy, thus entailed, 
brought about the segregation, into permanent 
family-groups, of individuals associated for the per- 



The Biological Aspect of Education ^^ 

formance of sexual and parental functions ; the main- 
tenance of such family-groups involved the setting 
up of permanent reciprocal necessities of behavior 
among the members of the group," etc.^ This is 
Professor Fiske's well-known doctrine of infancy as 
partly responsible for the institution of the family in 
society and of morality in man. 

It remained for Professor Nicholas Murray Butler 
to interpret the significance of infancy for education, 
as Professor Fiske had done for society, which he 
does as follows : " The rich suggestion that this 
doctrine of Mr. Fiske and this conception of modern 
science have for us, seems to me to be this : The 
entire educational period after the physical adjust- 
ment has been made, after the child can walk alone, 
can feed itself, can use its hands, and has, therefore, 
acquired physical and bodily independence, is an 
adjustment to what may be called our spiritual envi- 
ronment. After the physical adjustment is reason- 
ably complete, there remains yet to be accomplished 
the building of harmonious and reciprocal relations 
with those great acquisitions of the race that consti- 
tute civilization ; and, therefore, the lengthening 
period of infancy simply means that we are spending 
nearly half of the life of each generation in order to 
develop in the young some conception of the vast 
acquirements of the historic past and some mas- 
tery of the conditions of the immediate present." ^ 
In brief, infancy is the period of plasticity, the 
period of growth, in which that superior adjust- 

i *' Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," Vol. II, pp. 342, 369. 
2 "The Meaning of Education," p. 13. 

D 



34 



The Philosophy of Education 



The Brain as 
the Organ 
of the Mind. 

History of 
LocaUzation 
of Mental 
Function. 



ment to environment which constitutes education is 
effected. 

To summarize, the discussion of the second bio- 
logical fact adds to the conception of education as 
reached at the end of the consideration of the first 
biological fact, namely, education is the superior 
adjustment of a human being to his environment, 
the element of the time when this adjustment is 
achieved; and further, it puts new significance into 
the term human in the definition. 

But there were three biological facts that had sig- 
nificance for education, and it remains to consider 
the third, viz., the brain as the organ of the mind. 

The brain, for a long time, has been thought by some 
to be the organ of the mind ; but only for a short time, 
since modern pathology and anatomy, has it been so 
conceived by all. Aristotle located the mental func- 
tions in the heart. Ancient physicians, the proto- 
types of the modern physiological psychologists, 
located wisdom in the heart, joviality in the spleen, 
anger in the gall, love in the liver, and vanity in the 
lungs, whence a man might literally be puffed up with 
vanity. The supposed origin of melancholy, black 
bile, gave it, etymologically, its name. Even to-day 
common usage of language makes the heart the seat 
of the affections, the emotions, and the moral qualities, 
and the head the seat of the intellect, as in the oft- 
made contrast between education of the head and 
heart. Hippocrates, 460-320 B.C., may possibly have 
known that the brain is the seat of the mind, though 
Herophilus of Bithynia, 300 b.c, is reported by 
Galen as having been the first to hold this position. 



The Biological Aspect of Education ;^^ 

To-day four lines of proof indicate the brain as the Proof of the 
organ of the mind, — indicate, that is to say, that mental ^f Brahi and 
functioning is, in some way, as yet only theoretically Mind. 
understood, correlated with the functioning of the 
brain. The evidence is pathological, anatomical, vivi- 
sectional, and from common experience. Pathologi- 
cally, it is shown by autopsies that different mental 
diseases are due to lesions in different portions of the 
brain. Anatomically, it is shown that afferent nerves 
from the sense organs lodge in the brain. The 
stimuli that they carry result in molecular changes 
in the brain, corresponding to sensations in the mind, 
and from the brain these stimuli are redirected through 
efferent nerves or motor reactions. Vivisectionally, 
the loss of certain portions of the brain of lower ani- 
mals, as, for example, the hemispheres of a frog, pro- 
duces characteristic changes in conduct. In this 
particular instance the reactions to given stimuli are 
no longer unpredictable, as normally. Finally, the 
effect of stimulants, narcotics, and fevers upon con- 
sciousness is a matter of common experience. Directly 
these stimuli are changing the brain states, indirectly 
they affect consciousness. 

There is a fifth line of evidence to show that the brain 
is the organ of the mind, but it is not yet sufficiently 
made out, however, to justify its inclusion among the 
lines of proof. It is known, with notable exceptions, 
that large brains generally correspond with intelli- 
gence ; but it is doubtless true that fineness of or- 
ganized structure, intricacy of convolution, and devel- 
opment of the associative fibres have more" to do with 
intelligence than brain weight alone. Quality alone is 



^6 The Philosophy of Education 

better here than quantity alone, within the natural 
limits, though both combined would seem to be the 
desideratum. The most recent investigations seem 
to confirm the impression that large brains are the 
organs of superior intelligence. Thus M. Manouvrier 
writes concerning the production of large brains, 
" The first factor is evidently intellectual superiority, 
since, for equal height, a series of intellectually dis- 
tinguished men exceeds the general average in brain- 
weight by about 1 50 grams." ^ The same writer points 
out, however, that the brain-weight increases more 
rapidly in proportion to the intelligence because " the 
surface increases only as the square of the linear 
dimension, while the volume increases as its cube" ; 
also he thinks that large brains go with large bodies, 
an increase of brain-weight of about 12 per cent be- 
ing secured by an increase of bodily weight of 30 
per cent. 
Significance Accepting, then, the position that the brain is the 
oTthis^Fact!" organ of the mind, and that brain states are the sine 
qua non, at least in our present existence, of mental 
states, it is manifest that education, from the bottom 
point of view, consists in structural modification of 
the brain and of the central nervous system of which 
the brain is headquarters. Without the develop- 
ment of the sensory and motor regions of the brain, 
the fruits of education in the mental powers of obser- 
vation, perception, reasoning, and volition cannot be 
reached. Mental habits are primarily brain habits. 
Mental inefficiency is first brain inefficiency. 

It was the custom of educators until two genera- 

1 Quoted in Literary Digest, Nov. 21, 1903. 



The Biological Aspect of Education 37 

tions ago, when physiological psychology arose (partly 
in consequence of the newly awakened consciousness 
of biological problems), and it is still too commonly 
the custom, to regard mind as independent in toto 
of *'the tenement of clay," as Locke called the body, 
in which it resides. The old sharp line of cleavage 
between the body and mind, which was erased by 
such books as Maudsley's " Physiology and Pathol- 
ogy of Mind," had to do with the formerly common 
distinction between the secular and the sacred. The 
conception of reality as an interrelated unity of 
experience is a contribution of the nineteenth cen- 
tury scientists and philosophers alike to the world's 
thought. 

Educators must yield the theory that the mind 
is an isolated and unattached entity caught for a 
time in this mundane sphere and detained in the 
body as its prison-house, in favor of the theory that 
mind and body together constitute one organic unity. 
Gladly ought this transfer of theories to be effected 
in view of the resulting, new, and serviceable means 
of education thereby attained. The discipline of the 
body, of the hands, of the senses, is also a discipline, 
though not the only discipline, of the mind. It is 
this reenforcement of hitherto simply mental means 
of education by physical and physiological means 
which is the significance for education of the third 
biological fact, and which is the explanation of cer- 
tain of the newer elements in the growing curriculum 
of to-day. Education is not transformations of an 
immaterial entity which is ageless and capable of 
being influenced as easily at fifty as at fifteen, and 



38 The Philosophy of Education 

of becoming with any late start all that it might ever 
have been. It is always too late, so far as our pres- 
ent knowledge goes, to be what one might have been. 
Education is primarily modification of the central 
nervous system. It is much more, as we shall see; 
but without this foundation it could not be. Because 
of the changing character of this nervous system, 
education must do its great work while it can. In 
his foundational work on "The Education of the 
Central Nervous System," Mr. Halleck uses this 
language in his preface : " If brain cells are allowed 
to pass the plastic stage without being subjected to 
the proper stimuli or training, they will never fully 
develop- The majority of adults have many unde- 
veloped spots in their brains." Education must 
strike the central nervous system while it is plastic. 
The plasticity of the nervous system means that the 
individual is capable of being influenced by his sur- 
roundings, yet without the sacrifice of his individu- 
ality. Plasticity begins with life and reaches its 
height perhaps at about eighteen years of age. After 
twenty-five a new science is rarely acquired or a for- 
eign tongue spoken without accent. The fibres of 
association in the brain increase in number till the 
approximate age of thirty-three, after which time how 
hardly shall a man acquire a new idea except in his 
own field ! What the youth does not learn, the man, 
outside of his own line, will not. He may flatter him- 
self that, like Cato, he can learn a new subject when 
he is old, only to find, as a rule, when he begins the 
task, that he is not a Cato, that the time is past for 
all that sort of thing. A man is little more than 



The Biological Aspect of Education 39 

the sum total of the nerve reactions made habitual in 
his youth. Whatever else he may become is due to 
that mental factor, to be considered in Chapter VI, 
which we call effort. And even with effort he will 
have great difficulty in overcoming the results of 
wrongly trained motor nerves in youth which remain 
to vex us in age. The boy that cannot spell has few 
chances in his favor as a man. The youth in whose 
nervous system have not been well laid the two pillars 
of sensory and motor training, the getting of all the 
sensations that the organs of sense make possible and 
the proper reaction upon them, cannot hope to have 
reared in his case the superstructure of man's highest 
thought and feeling and action. Every sense must 
be trained by use, and self-expression must accom- 
pany the reception of sensations and ideas. Only 
so is the nervous system made the ally and not the 
enemy of the educator. 

The nature of the nervous system warns us not 
simply against inadequate physiological foundations for 
education, and against frittering away the educational 
opportunity in the plastic period of youth, but also, 
and particularly in our day of unprecedented com- 
mercial activity, against abbreviating the educational 
period of years which nature designed. The full 
development of the brain is not reached until maturity. 
The male brain reaches its maximum weight at fifteen 
years of age, and later becomes slightly less. The 
female brain is earlier in reaching its full weight. 
The growth of the brain, which is responsible for its 
increased weight, consists in the enlargement of the 
nerve cells and in the multiplication of the fibres. 



40 The Philosophy of Education 

The development of the brain, which, rather than its 
growth, is responsible for the quaUty of the intelli- 
gence, consists in the separation of the organs of the 
brain from each other and in their reunion through 
the fibres of association, the brain itself becoming 
thus one of the best illustrations from the natural 
world of an organic unity through variety, of an 
integrated heterogeneity. Such is the marvellous 
mechanism with which the conscious life of man is 
associated. Its highest centres, the frontal lobes, 
with which probably one's serious thinking is done, 
are not developed fully in childhood, but only at 
adolescence do they begin to be serviceable in the 
highest way to the individual. To continue the train- 
ing of the nervous system through youth is actually 
to lengthen the period of plasticity in individual cases 
to an appreciable extent, with all the enlargement of 
possibilities which this entails. To leave certain por- 
tions of the nervous system neglected is to invite 
earlier decay of those parts. To omit the most care- 
ful and systematic training of the senses while the 
sensory regions of the brain are growing together by 
means of those associative fibres which condition the 
exercise of judgment and reason is to inhibit the 
best development of these highest powers of con- 
sciousness. It is only an all round development of 
the whole nervous system during the growing period 
that is the surety of an integral individual and an all 
round education which men so praise. What a rude 
violence is done nature's gifts when children are taken 
from primary and secondary schools and made to be- 
come winners of bread for the family! Or when 



The Biological Aspect of Education 41 

children are cast upon their own resources in the big 
world ! It is a physical sin when the problems of 
mature life, either theoretical or practical, are forced 
upon the immature child. Our American life, par- 
ticularly in the factory towns, is in danger of gaining 
the world and losing its own soul. 

Admitting as now manifest that, from the point of what can 
view of the third biolo2:ical fact, education consists Education 

° . do for the 

in modifications of the brain and central nervous Brain? 
system, the difficult question arises as to what edu- 
cation can really do for the nerve cells of the brain. 
The temptation is strong upon educators, particularly 
upon those who have not duly considered the phys- 
ical limitations of mental development, to extend 
unwarrantably the possibilities of education. The 
greatest philosopher of the eighteenth century, if 
not of modern times, Immanuel Kant, showed this 
limitless view of what education could achieve. 
" Man can become man," he declares, " only through 
education ; he is nothing but what education makes 
him." But this view is too generous. The brain can- 
not be born again through education. In capacity 
the brain once for all is what it is. Though smaller 
than its most ardent advocates would allow, the field 
of education is exceedingly real. It is in the realiza- 
tion of the innate capacity of the individual brain 
that education has its excellent task. Education is 
not a creator ; there is but one Creator : education is 
a developer. Admitting that the inherent capabili- 
ties of each brain are nature's original gift through 
hereditary endowment, the question recurs. What can 
education do for the brain ? 



42 The Philosophy of Edueation 

Without exceeding the limits of conservative esti- 
mate in this largely unexplored matter, it is safe to 
say that education can develop and strengthen the 
nervous tissue of the brain ; can make new nervous 
connections and wear deeper old ones ; can awaken 
the unawakened nerve cells of the brain; and can 
through the formation of habit set the mind free for 
new action and thought : in short, education can make 
the brain approximately as efficient an organ as it is 
capable of becoming. To stress these points briefly 
in succession : — 
Develop- Mr. Halleck puts on the title-page of his book, 

ment of Brain already referred to, the following words of Drs. Mc- 
Kendrick and Snodgrass, "Just as muscular exer- 
cise causes an increased growth of muscular fibre, so 
regulated mental exercise must develop and strengthen 
the tissue of the brain." 
Formation of Again, it is One of the unavoidable hypotheses of 
modern physiological psychology, which attempts to 
explain mental facts by their underlying brain equiva- 
lents, that perception, memory, habit, and acquired 
power are dependent upon nervous connections in 
the brain. Professor Bain first, and Professor James 
following, not to mention others, can explain memory 
or acquisition only as a series of new nervous growths, 
the establishment of a number of beaten tracks in 
certain lines of the cerebral substance. These ner- 
vous connections are often made for the first time 
through mental endeavors in response to educational 
stimuli, and are regularly worn deep and smooth 
through such influence. In making such figurative 
statements as the preceding concerning brain paths 



New Nerve 
Connections 



The Biological Aspect of Education 43 

made and worn smooth as the explanation of the 
mental phenomena of memory, habit, and the like^ 
care must be taken to guard against the strictly 
literal interpretation. All that can be said is that 
these explanations are the most serviceable of the 
possible hypotheses, and may be true. 

Again, with propriety is it claimed that education Quickening 
can awaken certain unawakened portions of the ^f^^^^ 
cells of the brain. Perhaps no brain is so normally 
educated that its maximum efficiency is attained. 
Among the most cautious of the students of the 
effects upon the brain brought about by external 
influence may be named Professor Donaldson, who 
(in Chapter XVIII of his ''Growth of the Brain") 
uses the following language : " Education must fail 
to produce any fundamental changes in the nervous 
organization, but to some extent it can strengthen 
formed structures by exercise, and in part waken into 
activity the unorganized remnant of the dormant cell. 
No amount of cultivation will give good growth where 
the nerve cells are few and ill-nourished, but careful 
culture can do much where there are those with 
strong inherent impulses toward development. On 
neurological grounds, therefore, nurture is to be con- 
sidered of much less importance than nature, and in 
that sense the capacities that we most admire in per- 
sons worthy of remark are certainly inborn rather 
than made." 

Lastly, it was mentioned that education could. Formation of 
through the formation of habit, set the mind free for ^^^^*" 
new action and thought. A voluntary action made 
with deliberation requires the attention of the cerebral 



44 The Philosophy of Education 

hemispheres. Through frequent repetition this action 
becomes habitual, the lower centres of the brain can 
take care of it, and the higher remain free again for 
something new. The process thus briefly defined 
constitutes from Huxley's point of view the very pos- 
sibility of education. After narrating the practical 
joke on the old soldier, now a table servant, who with 
a waiter full of dishes comes at sudden command to 
" attention," Huxley continues : " The possibility of all 
education (of which military drill is only one particular 
form) is based upon the existence of this power which 
the nervous system possesses, of organizing conscious 
actions into more or less unconscious, or reflex, opera- 
tions. It may be laid down as a rule which is called 
the Law of Association, that if any two mental states 
be called up together or in succession, with due fre- 
quency and vividness, the subsequent production of 
one of them will suffice to call up the other. 

"The object of intellectual education is to create 
such indissoluble associations of our ideas of things, 
in the order and relation in which they occur in 
nature ; that of a moral education is to unite as 
fixedly the ideas of evil deeds with those of pain and 
degradation, and of good actions with those of pleas- 
ure and nobleness." ^ 

This is habit, which the Duke of Wellington en- 
thusiastically exclaimed to be "ten times nature." 
Through habits formed in school the nerve cells ^s 
I pen these hues take care of the writing, the spell- 
ing, and, for the most part, the expression, leaving the 
mind free to attend to the thought. Rightly trained 

^ Huxley, " Elementary Lessons in Physiology," p. 302. 



The Biological Aspect of Education 45 

nerve cells are the trusty servant, leaving the mis- 
tress of the household free to entertain her guests. 

The law of association as stated above by Huxley, 
and which underlies the formation of habit, is par- 
ticularly serviceable in educating instincts. Purely 
reflexly and instinctively, without malice or fore- 
thought, a youngster does things that are unbe- 
coming socially. A word of admonition, a threat, 
or, finally, some penalty administered becomes asso- 
ciated with the performance of the act. This associa- 
tion once formed, the instinctive tendency to perform 
the act is inhibited by the thought of the undesired 
consequence of the act, or by the thought of approval 
that follows the non-performance of the act. Thus 
instincts become subject to direction by thought. 
And, happily for us, the desirable association, once 
formed and set in the grooves of the cerebral sub- 
stance, becomes itself a kind of second instinct. 
Thus habit is the friend as well as the foe of the good. 
And when good action, that is, from the biological 
point of view, action which is preservative of the 
organism, has become habitual and not sporadic, we 
have what Aristotle called character. And from this 
point of view education itself becomes the process 
whereby useful reactions on stimuli are made habit- 
ual. The educational period is the habit-forming 
epoch in life. 

In addition to the practically certain influences. The 
just enumerated, of education upon the physical i^^^"*^"^^ 
nature of the brain, there is yet another that we Educabiiity. 
should like to think, and with some degree of assur- 
ance may think, results. It has to do with the effect 



46 The Philosophy of Education 

upon posterity of long lines of educated ancestry, and 
with the much-vexed question in biological circles of 
the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It is 
much safer and preferable, when possible, to explain 
results without the use of this principle for which 
such meagre evidence is forthcoming. Professor 
Donaldson, in Chapter XIX of his book already 
quoted, states the situation thus, " We feel . . . that 
the descendants of several generations of educated 
ancestors should have a nervous system favorably 
modified, more vigorous, more responsive, more accu- 
rate in its reactions, and growing, perhaps, for a 
longer time, thus extending the period of its adapta- 
bility. But for this the evidence must still be 
sought." On the other side, we have Professor 
Lankester, in the article already quoted, claiming the 
transmission of educability. It does not appear, 
however, whether this is done through inheritance or 
through the preservation of the more fortunate varia- 
tions. On the same side such a leading educator and 
wide observer of educational effects as President 
Eliot speaks boldly out, " Thanks to the beneficent 
mysteries of hereditary transmission, no capital earns 
such interest as personal culture." ^ Of course, the 
education itself has to be acquired afresh by each 
succeeding generation. The question is whether the 
acquisition does not become easier with the lapse of 
time. The latest word on this subject is from Pro- 
fessor Karl Pearson in the Huxley Memorial Lecture 
for 1903. He writes: '* There can, I think, be no 
doubt that intelligence or ability follows precisely the 

1 Eliot, " Educational Reform," p. 21. 



The Biological Aspect of Education 47 

same laws of inheritance as cephalic index or any- 
other physical character ... we inherit our parents' 
tempers, our parents' conscientiousness, shyness and 
ability, even as we inherit their stature, forearm and 
span. ... If the conclusion we have reached to- 
night be substantially a true one, and for my part I 
cannot for a moment doubt that it is so, then what is 
its lesson for us as a community ? Why, simply that 
geniality and probity and ability, though they may be 
fostered by home environment and good schools, are 
nevertheless bred and not created. The education is 
of small value unless it be applied to an intelligent 
race of men." ^ 

These words from Professor Pearson are in line 
with the usual biological thought of the day. They 
do not permit us as teachers to consider education an 
inheritable possession from father to son ; we are not 
endowing natures with capacities. But education 
seems rather to be one ©f those acquired characters, 
like the habits of speech, virtue, and temperance, 
which must be won afresh by each generation ; we 
are developing capacities into realities. Natural and 
artificial selection improve capacities ; education 
realizes them. Education is not a natural character 
capable of physical inheritance; it is an acquired 
character capable of social inheritance. That is, 
like tradition, it is passed on from one generation to 
another by invitation and word of mouth. It goes 
not like dispositions from bone to bone and flesh 
to flesh, but from hand to hand, as it were, like 

'^Nature, Oct. 22, 1903, "Inheritance of Psychical and Physical 
Characters in Man." 



48 The Philosophy of Education 

the way in which the son takes up the father's pro- 
fession in life. 

So far from discouraging teachers, this position 
ought to stimulate them to greater effort. If educa- 
tion is not capable of physical transmission from 
parent to offspring, the greater the importance that 
each generation be given its full benefit. There is 
encouragement also in the thought that social heredity 
is no less real a phenomenon than physical heredity. 
Thus teachers conscious of their task may beUeve 
they are laboring for future generations as well as for 
the present, for they are, through the influence of 
man on man, if not through the influence of man on 
the embryo. 

The last of the sure effects of education upon the 
brain mentioned above, viz., the formation of habits, 
whereby education itself is the process of making 
useful reaction reflex, raises a last question, with 
which the discussion of the third biological fact shall 
have an end. The question is a theoretical one and 
takes us into the future. It is this, Is a being all of 
whose actions are completely reflex and useful the 
end and aim of education ? Suppose we reacted 
rightly and fatally to every situation which life pre- 
sented, would we then have become the kind of beings 
that education should want to make .-* In such a case 
all intentions of ours would give place to mechanism, 
and all directive consciousness would lapse into fault- 
less unconsciousness. In brief, Is automatism the 
end of education ? The statement of the affirma- 
tive shall be made in the language of an advocate, 
"Every conscious act, every thought, every senti- 



The Biological Aspect of Education 49 

ment, presupposes an imperfection, a delay, a check, 
a want of organization ; if, therefore, to form the type 
of ideal man, we take the quality which all others pre- 
suppose, and which does not itself presuppose any 
other, — viz., organization, — and if we think of it as 
raised to the highest possible degree, our ideal of 
man is an unconscious automaton marvellously com- 
plicated and unified." ^ That is to say, human 
Frankensteins are the end of education. 

In estimating this position, it is to be noted, first, 
that the automatic reflexes asserted to characterize 
the ideal man are the summations of past experiences. 
Hence the automaton would work in a stationary 
world where the present was like the past, and the 
future was barren. But our world is growing, and for 
the new situations that continually arise the reflex 
act is not sufficient. Consciousness is needed as an 
engine of direction, as a deliberator, as a facile ad- 
juster to novel situations, and this entirely without 
regard to the mixed question of whether it is free or 
determined in its action. The utility of conscious- 
ness to the organism is evident from the fact that it 
has been developed and remains a characteristic of 
the highest mammals. Its function seems to be, 
biologically, to hold by the pleasant acts, and to let 
go the painful ones, thereby preserving and advancing 
the life of the organism by that general, though not 
exceptionless, law of nature whereby pleasure and 
profit and pain and harm go together in pairs. And 

1 Paulhan, " Le Devoir et la Science Morale," Revue Philosophique, 
December, 1886. Quoted and discussed in Guyau, " Education and 
Heredity," p. 283. 

£ 



50 The Philosophy of Education 

the present constitution of our changing world seems 
to render it likely that consciousness will remain an 
indispensable characteristic of the organism. Man's 
adjustment to his environment is not once for all, but 
is a growing adjustment to a changing environment. 
Unconscious habit can take care of the old in our 
environment, such as walking, dressing, eating, and 
much of our talking, indeed, all together, the larger 
half of our lives ; but the new requires conscious at- 
tention. Huxley cannot be wound up morally to go 
forever right. Thus automatism as the end of educa- 
tion looks only backward and not forward. It is 
unpractical. 

In the second place, the theory of the end of educa- 
tion as unconscious automatism does injustice to 
the nature of that consciousness which it regards as 
a passing phenomenon in upward evolution. In the 
words of Guyau, " Consciousness is not purely and 
simply an arrested reflex action, as contemporary 
psychologists so often define it ; it is a corrected 
reflex action, brought into correspondence with the 
changes of the environment, wound up anew rather 
than stopped." ^ Only a being with a consciousness, 
permitting the mastery of the untried, can greet the 
unknown with a cheer. 

Even if the theory of unconscious automatism 
were practical, even if that position did justice to 
the function of consciousness in life, still it would 
be an undesirable end of education. We like to 
be conscious, that is, we of the West, and we should 
not like any end of education that made us uncon- 

1 Guyau, " Education and Heredity," p. 284. 



The Biological Aspect of Education 51 

scious. Not simply does consciousness influence 
action in novel situations, but it lights up all action 
whatever, and we like to walk in its light. Through 
it we become the world's mirror. Apart from the 
pain that may attend physical dissolution, we fear 
the unconsciousness that may attend death. Con- 
sciousness is an agent, and as such justifies its ex- 
istence from the biological point of view. It is also 
a spectator, and as such enables men joyously to 
see and to perceive as well as to act. 

There are several additional services consciousness 
renders the human organism, not explicitly involved 
in the theory of automatism, but which render it 
impossible ever to exclude consciousness from a defi- 
nition of the end of education. It is the guardian 
of those very habits which, when once consciously 
acquired, continue to act so automatically and service- 
ably. It gives us the sense of time, involving 
memory, history, and prophecy, without which man 
could not look before and after and sigh for what 
is not. Again, by holding up an object to be 
striven for, it makes demands on the latent energy 
of our organism, even if, as against what some 
experiments would go to show, it does not actually 
add thereto. No work in fineness or in extent is 
comparable to that done under the stimulus of a 
pressing ideal. And again, consciousness gives us 
ideas as ends of action. An idea pursued is an 
ideal. Thus consciousness makes possible morality, 
which is action according to ideas. A right idea 
that appeals to consciousness with force is felt as 
an obligation, while a wrong and appealing idea is 



52 The Philosophy of Education 

temptation. And yet again, consciousness makes 
us social by including the world of our fellows as ob- 
jects of imitation, competition, affection, and sacrifice. 
Thus at the end of the protracted discussion of 
the third biological fact, viz., the brain as the organ 
of consciousness, we are prepared to insist that the 
being to be educated must be, and must remain, 
conscious. Must remain conscious because of the 
indispensableness, as described, of that attribute. 
Must be conscious in order to frame to himself a 
conception of the end which, in his own case, it is 
the design of education to attain. Including, then, 
the element of consciousness in the answer to the 
original question as to the nature of education, we 
First are prepared to say at the end of the discussion of 

Definition of ^^iq biological aspcct of the subject, that Education 

Education. , ^ . ,. r ■ i r • 

IS the superior adjustment of a conscious human being 
to his environm,ent. 

There is the skeleton of our final conception of 
the nature of education, but it remains to clothe it 
with flesh and blood and meaning. Biology, dealing 
with life processes, can start us aright, but since, 
like other sciences, it is but one of the ways of look- 
ing at life, its message alone is not final. It deals 
with the way in which organic life develops, but not 
with the origin or with the significance of that life. 
The results of biology are many, but its main char- 
acteristic is its method, its evolutionary point of 
view in any object of study. We have had its sug- 
gestive word as to the theory of education. But 
even in a purely theoretical inquiry, as this intends 
primarily to be, we must not lose whatever practical 



The Biological Aspect of Education 53 

word, as a consequence of its theory, biology has to 
say to us as educators. So our last paragraph must 
be devoted to the consequences for education of 
the biological point of view. 

In the first place biology, with its emphasis on Conse- 
life as adjustment between the inner and the outer, J^^^^^esfor 

■^ ' Education of 

puts the practical at the bottom of the rational and the Bioiogi- 

the speculative. The first thing is to exist, to live, vfew°'''*°^ 

and this is a practical matter. After that one may (i) The 

pursue ideal ends. But unless the ideal ends them- Practical is 

. the Basis of 

selves are m some way contributory to living, in the the Theoreti- 
wider sense of appreciation, if not in the narrower ^^^' 
sense of physical existence, then are they phantasms. 
This is the basis for the philosophical doctrine of 
"pragmatism," whose test of truth is touch with 
life. In the field of education this means that the 
prime thing concerning any educational theory is 
not, whether it is new or old, but whether its prac- 
tice furthers sound education. 

In the second place, biology has its own notion (2) Con- 
of the purpose consciousness serves in the world, a^u^efuf^^^ 
Primarily it is not declaratory of ideals, but a use- Addition 
ful addition to the organism. The last agency de- organism, 
veloped by the organism in its growing attempt to 
come into the most practicable relations with its 
environment is consciousness. Our reason is first 
of all our guide ; later, it is the solver of our prob- 
lems. It is more evident in the case of the lower 
animals that intelligence is for action rather than 
for thought's own sweet sake. In the language of 
our master craftsman in the field of psychology ap- 
pHed to teaching, ''Consciousness would thus seem 



54 The Philosophy of Education 

in the first instance to be nothing but a sort of 
superadded biological perfection, — useless unless it 
prompted to useful conduct, and inexplicable apart 
from that consideration." ^ It must be recognized, of 
course, that emphasis upon consciousness as practical 
by no means detracts from its function in life as 
theoretical, by means of which latter function it 
makes of man the only metaphysical animal. The 
original use of a factor in evolution by no means 
sets a value upon its final use. Herbert Spencer 
rightly showed that it was no valid argument against 
his theory that the belief in immortality originated 
in dreams and reflections in streams to say that this 
origin invalidated the real doctrine of immortality 
to-day. We must distinguish between origins and 
final uses. It would be as egregious a mistake to say 
that because consciousness is primarily practical there- 
fore it is not theoretical, as to say, with Plato, that 
the ideas toward which the world is moving are the 
cause of the world. The former substitutes origin 
for end, the latter the end for the origin. We must 
read the future by the past, but in a genuinely de- 
veloping world we must not limit the future to the 
past. All of which is intended to say, with correct 
implication, that from the biological point of view 
consciousness is primarily one of the cooperant agents 
of the organism for its own well-being in its world. 
(3) Educa- In the third place, education is a utility. This is 
what biology has to say ; other sciences will have 
other things to say in addition. Education forms 
good habits, that is, regular and serviceable reactions 

^ James, " Talks to Teachers," p. 24. 



tion is a 

Utility, 



The Biological Aspect of Education 55 

on life's stimuli. One acts differently as the outcome 
of his education. Education is an extra increment 
of power in the individual in his effort to conquer 
his world. 

Finally, and most practical of all, biology is totally (4) Educa- 
against the doctrine of receptivity in the organism, fh°"^^hsif 
the child, as the process of educating. In the same expression, 
world different organisms have come to exist, and 
specimens of the same kind of organism differ in 
themselves, and all because these individuals reacted 
differently to their identical general environment; 
because they were not fashioned simply by their 
surroundings, but also by their selection of their 
surroundings, and their reaction to them. Education 
comes through what the child does, and says, and 
thinks, and feels in the presence of the environment 
which the teacher supplies. The teacher teaches the 
child ; the child educates himself. In being taught 
the child is passive ; in being educated, he is active. 
In the school these processes are practically syn- 
chronous. The thing to be stressed is that teachers 
educate more, even if to gain the time necessary for 
it they have to teach less. Education is self-expres- 
sion, not impression alone. Every impression made 
by teachers upon pupils should be followed by expres- 
sion in some fashion from the pupils. In this way 
education becomes inwrought in the nervous system, 
and is not simply content of consciousness. Teachers 
who are students of the history of education will find 
justification for this pedagogic principle in certain of 
their own writers, particularly Froebel. Its growing 
recognition to-day finds witness in more understanding 



56 The Philosophy of Education 

and less verbal memory ; in more written work in 
the form of note-books, drawings, plans, and maps ; 
in measurements and laboratory experiments ; in the 
kindergarten ; in methods of self-expression in wood 
and metal through the physical and mental discipline 
of manual training schools ; and, finally, in the de- 
velopment of the powers of independent thinking and 
original criticism. 

This is what biology has to say, so far as we have 
been able to interpret its message, on the theory, and, 
secondarily, on the practice, of education. During the 
discussion we have followed Spencer in insisting that 
life is not simply protoplasm, but also adjustment. 
But it remains now to insist also that life is proto- 
plasm which takes form, among other ways, in the 
human body. And this body, as an integral element 
of the individual to be educated, and its rights, have 
to be considered. This constitutes the physiological 
aspect of education, to which we now come. 

REFERENCES ON THE BIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF 
EDUCATION 

Bain, Education as a Science, Chap. II. 

Brooks, Foundations of Zoology, Sec. III. 

Butler, The Meaning of Education, Essay I. 

Donaldson, The Growth of the Brain, Chap. XVIII. 

Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, II, Ft. II, Chap. XXII. 

Guyau, Education and Heredity, Chap. IX. 

Halleck, Education of the Central Nervous System. 

Harris, Psychologic Foundation of Education, Chaps. XII, XIII. 

James, Talks to Teachers, Chaps. III-V. 

Lankester, The Significance of the Increased Size of the Cere- 
brum in Recent as compared with Extinct Mammalia, Jubilee 
Volume of the Soci^te de Biologic, 1899. Reprinted in Nature, 
April 26, 1900. 



CHAPTER III 
THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF EDUCATION 

The biological aspect of education has emphasized The Place of 
the importance of that kind of education which puts Education^ 
one in touch with the real conditions of life. It has 
emphasized the importance of the brain as the central 
office of the nervous system, as the agent of adjust- 
ment of the organism to its surroundings. We have 
now to inquire more intimately concerning the nature 
of the being to be educated, in whose adjustment to 
life consists his education. For our purpose the 
rough working division of the individual into body, as 
the physical expression of his life, and mind is suffi- 
cient. Such a division at the present moment in the 
discussion is not intended to close in advance the 
metaphysical inquiry whether ultimately body should 
not be read in terms of mind as against the materiaUsts 
who maintain that mind is but the body in an attenu- 
ated and etherealized condition. Without attempting 
to solve this dark difficulty, the discussion of which 
would be irrelevant here, it is intelligible to say that 
the child to be educated has a body and a mind. In 
this respect he is like the everyday reality of life 
untransformed by metaphysical insight, viz., matter 
and mind. In extending further our conception of 
education, let us begin with the education of the 
body, rather than of the mind. 

57 



58 The Philosophy of Education 

The reason for this order in the discussion is that 
Hfe itself is first physical and then mental. The 
highest powers of mind are the last addition in 
the development of organic forms. The history of 
nature seems to reveal in succession the inanimate 
world ; then the plant world with powers of nutrition 
and generation ; then the animate world with addi- 
tional powers of sensation, consciousness, and move- 
ment, such as the lower animals have ; then, finally, 
the human world, with powers of self-consciousness, 
thought, aesthetic emotion, and choice. Such the 
order of creation seems to be. In this development 
nothing valuable of the earlier stages is lost in the 
later. The earlier stages of development are aufge- 
hoben, as Hegel would say, in the later stages. Thus 
man, the last in the list of developed beings, is mate- 
rial and animal, as well as human and divine. His 
body is live matter, possessing still, however, the 
property of inertia to challenge his effort. Like the 
plant, it demands nutrition. It also contains a ner- 
vous system which allies man to the animals, which 
crudely differentiates him from the plant world, and 
which makes sensation and movement possible. Out 
of sensation and movement develop the highest men- 
tal powers of abstract thought and voluntary action. 
Care must be taken to avoid sharp lines of distinction 
between the roughly marked stages of this growth. 
Final distinctions between the inanimate and the 
animate, the plant and the animal, the lower animal 
and man, are difficult, if not impossible, to discover. 
To the scientist as well as to the philosopher exist- 
ence is a unity. 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 59 

Thus the physical is the foundation of all life, men- 
tal included, and in considering physical education 
before mental education, we seem to be following 
nature's own leading, and to be putting the education 
of the body into the basic place that is its due. The 
mind does not live in the body, as its *' clay cottage," 
in Locke's phrase, but rather grows in the body as a 
plant in its soil. A poor soil means arrested growth, 
while a good soil conditions full fruition. 

There are three questions concerning physical edu- The Three 
cation which confront us : first, How does the body Questions 

-^ concerning 

mfluence the mmd.? second, What consequent atten- Education of 
tion should it receive } and third. What attention is it *^^ ^°^^' 
receiving in our educational system to-day .? 

First, the influence of the body on the mind. The The influ- 
fact of such influence is unquestionable. Common BodVon^he 
experience shows that a tired brain means a slow Mind. 
mind ; that a rested brain means a quick mind ; that 
a brain artificially stimulated with alcohol, hashish, 
and like stimulants means temporary brilliancy ; that 
a brain deadened with narcotics means mental inac- 
tivity ; that a brain improperly nourished by the 
blood, as in fever, means delirium ; and that a brain 
whose organic functioning is destroyed means in- 
sanity. In the preceding chapter the scientific evi- 
dence that the brain is the organ of the mind has 
already been reviewed. 

The question arises as to how this influence is How the 
effected. In brief, it is by means of the central JfA^^n^eof 

' -^ ^ Body on 

nervous system. Here body and mind come into Mind is 
closest intimacy, and through this means the body ^^^^^' 
most influences the mind. The composition of the 



6o The Philosophy of Education 

nervous system is simple in outline, and intricate in 
detail. It consists, first, of nerve centres in the skull 
and backbone, the brain and the spinal cord, as they 
are called, and, second, nerves connecting these cen- 
tres with the sense organs of the body and with the 
muscles. The nerves connecting the centres^ with 
the sense organs are capable of being acted upon by 
physical stimuli, such as air and ether vibrations, 
touch, pressure, effluvia, in short, by motion, and are 
further capable of transmitting these stimuli to the 
brain ; hence they are called afferent or centripetal 
nerve fibres. Such a stimulus transmitted to the 
brain corresponds to a sensation in the mind, as 
when we see light or color, or hear sound, or touch a 
rough surface. Since they thus make sensations pos- 
sible, the afferent nerve fibres are also called sensory. 
The nerves that connect the centres with the muscles 
cause them to contract, and so make movement possi- 
ble. Carrying impulses out from the centres, they are 
called efferent, or centrifugal nerve fibres, and since 
they make movement possible, they are also called 
motor. Sometimes a nerve may contain both sensory 
and motor fibres. The nerve centres are gray in 
color, and are composed of masses of minute cells. 
Where the sensory nerve fibres enter the spinal cord 
and brain are the so-called sensory centres, and the 
portions of the spinal cord and brain immediately con- 
nected with the motor nerves are the so-called motor 
centres. The various portions of the centres are 
mutually connected by nerve fibres. 

The prime function of the nerve centres is the 
transformation of sensory stimuli into motor im- 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 6i 

pulses. One steps on the root of a tree, it remains ; 
on the foot of a man, it is withdrawn. It is the 
man's nervous system that makes the sensation and 
the movement possible. From these two, sensation 
and movement, develop all the final powers of con- 
sciousness. Sensation interpreted becomes knowl- 
edge, movement directed becomes will, the activity 
involved in each of these giving a tone of feeling to 
consciousness. 

Such, in briefest outline, is the nature of the cen- 
tral nervous system through which bodily influences 
reach the mind, and the training of which, along with 
the muscles, constitutes physical education. As a 
telephone system makes a city a compact unit, so the 
nervous system unites the body into one organic whole, 
with the brain the central office. " Viewed broadly, 
the brain is a mass of white matter, with nuclei of 
gray matter deeply imbedded in it, and with a sheet 
of gray matter, about one-fifth of a square metre in 
area, and between two and three millimetres thick, 
covering the folds, fissures, and convolutions of its 
surface."^ All appeals to the mind, educational and 
otherwise, must be made through the agency of the 
nervous system. The senses on the one hand and 
the muscles on the other are the two first gateways 
through which educational influences must proceed. 
The educator who would climb up into the mind by 
some other way is unaware of the nature of the child 
with whom he has to deal. The training of the senses 
and the doing of things well that require delicacy of 

1 Waller, " Human Physiology," p. 518. Quoted by Stout, " Manual 
of Psychology," p. 35. 



62 The Philosophy of Education 

muscular adjustment are the two beginnings of physi- 
cal education, and only a sound physical education 
can support a sound mental education. 
The In speaking of the nervous system, then, as under- 

Physiology , . ^ . ^ / , 

of Habit. lyiiig conscious processcs, we must not let the op- 
portunity pass to explain the physiology of the 
formation of habit, which, as biology has taught us, 
plays so essential a part in all education. Motor im- 
pulses, or action, are either involuntary or voluntary, 
that is, are due to impulses undeliberated upon, or 
to ideas clearly viewed and exclusively attended to. 
We involuntarily withdraw our hands from a hot 
stove ; we voluntarily get some remedy for the burn. 
The lower nerve centres, located mainly in the spinal 
cord, are responsible for the involuntary, the reflex, 
and the instinctive acts; and the higher nerve centres, 
located in the brain, are responsible for the voluntary 
acts. The highest mental processes, such as hesita- 
tion, deliberation, choice, reason, and the like, centre 
perhaps in the covering of the cerebrum, called the 
cortex. The circuit of a stimulus from the external 
world leading to an involuntary act, for example, the 
stimulus of contact with a hot stove, which circuit 
would represent the sensory and motor processes in 
the lower nerve centres, would be as follows : first, 
the sense organ of touch, located in the skin, would 
receive the stimulus of contact and then an afferent 
nerve fibre would take the stimulus to a spinal sensory 
cell ; whence a connecting fibre would take it to a 
spinal motor-cell, where it would be transformed from 
sensory stimulus to motor impulse ; and an efferent 
nerve fibre would carry the impulse out to the muscle, 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 6^ 

causing its contraction and removal from the stove, — 
all of which would have transpired in not more than 
one-tenth of a second. 

The circuit is much longer in the case of voluntary- 
actions, requiring the use of the higher as well as 
lower nerve centres, and involving in succession the 
stimulation of the sense organ, the transfer of the 
stimulus by an afferent nerve fibre to a spinal sen- 
sory cell ; then its conveyance by an afferent nerve 
tract to a cortical sensory cell ; then its passage through 
a connecting fibre to a cortical motor cell, during 
which process decisions are reached ; thence an effer- 
ent nerve tract conveys the motor impulse to a spinal 
motor cell ; and finally an efferent nerve fibre takes it 
to the muscle, and directed action ensues. The action 
may have been sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought 
any length of time, or it may have been abbreviated 
into one-fifth of a second. 

Now, all habits consist in turning over to the lower 
centres alone stimuli that once required the higher 
centres for their reaction. And from this physiolog- 
ical point of view, the whole of education, from the 
alphabet through philosophy, is but equipping a man's 
nervous system for proper and best habitual reactions 
on stimuli. Systematic thinking, aesthetic apprecia- 
tion of nature and life, and the virtues become con- 
stituent elements of the man's physical being as well 
as being mental characteristics. And the education 
which is bad is as firmly supported by the plastic 
nervous system as that which is good. 

Our question was, How does the body influence the Psychosis 
mind ? We have seen it is through the nervous sys- Neurosis. 



64 The Philosophy of Education 

tern, and we are now prepared to give a still more specific 
answer. It is only when nervous energy is operative 
in the higher brain centres that the mind has any 
content at all, that the mind is at all aware of itself. 
Not all nervous action is accompanied by conscious- 
ness. Most of that in the lower centres is not, but 
all consciousness is accompanied by nervous action. 
In the far-sounding phrase of the modern physiolo- 
gists, " no psychosis without neurosis." Mental ac- 
tivity is accompanied by brain activity. Conscious- 
ness, as we know it in our present mode of existence, 
manifests itself only as the correlate of a nervous 
system. This stone, which the anti-materialists began 
by rejecting, has become the head of the corner as the 
working hypothesis of modern physiological psychol- 
ogy.i It is also the basis for any conception of the 
fundamental place of the body in any general plan of 
education. The body is the home of the mind, in 
the forceful New Testament phrase, " the temple of 
the Holy Ghost." 

It may even be claimed with scientific credibility 
that not simply the normal consciousness is the cor- 
respondent of cerebration, but those abnormal mani- 
festations of consciousness, such as hypnotism, dual 
personalities, trances, subconsciousness, the sublimi- 
nal self, and insanities, are the accompaniments of 
definable changes in the nervous system. 
The Degree Since mental activity is dependent upon nervous 
activity in the brain, it is evident that the degree of 
one's mental efficiency at any given time will depend 
upon two things : first, the state of the brain itself ; 
1 Cf. Professor James, " Briefer Psychology," pp. 5-6. 



of Mental 
Efficiency. 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 65 

and second, the state of the physical body of which 
the brain is an organic part. Considering first the 
state of the brain as influencing mental activity, it 
is noticeable that the brain is most ready for the 
mind's work after sound sleep, during which unin- 
terrupted repair, without waste, has been going on. 
The nervous energy that mental activity consumes 
by setting free certain organic compounds in the 
brain substance, is replenished through the blood 
supply, bringing in nutrition and oxygen to the brain. 
" The brain may be likened to an engine which can 
do its work only when fuel is supplied and refuse 
removed."^ Fuel is supplied through pure blood, 
fresh air, and good food. Lighter kinds of physical 
exercise likewise repair brain tissue through the rest 
afforded. The brain is least ready for work after 
continuous application for two or three hours. The 
brain energy of children is less than that of adults, 
which accounts for the natural flagging of their at- 
tention after not more than twenty minutes of con- 
centrated effort. Heavy mental work demands more 
frequent and longer rest than light, because with light 
mental work the processes that repair the brain 
almost keep pace with those that deplete it. In 
general the quantity of brain energy at command 
corresponds with the physical energy of youth, 
maturity, and old age. 

Considering, in the second place, the state of the 
body of which the brain is a part, as influencing men- 
tal activity, it is to be noticed that the body is an 
organism, an assemblage of parts, each one of which 

1 Sully, "Teacher's Handbook of Psychology," p. 33. 



66 The Philosophy of Education 

in relation to the others is both means and end. 
When the muscles of the body are fatigued, the 
brain power is less. The harder kinds of physical 
exercise temporarily unfit for mental work by ab- 
sorbing the present vital energy of the system. 
Students who play football keep awake with diffi- 
culty over their books at night. Farmers go to sleep 
reading newspapers. If the digestive processes are 
very active, as after a hearty meal, the blood is drawn 
from the brain and used to digest the food, hence the 
mind is less active and heaviness is natural. A body 
in distress from cold, heat, or hunger makes mental 
action less efficient. In ill health the mind is slower 
in movement, and good health conditions the alertest 
states of mind. The quantity of nervous energy is 
on the ebb from morning till the middle of the after- 
noon, when the tide turns again. 

These are the facts that show the influence of the 
body on the mind, and prepare the way for the answer 
to the second question, namely, What consequent atten- 
tion should the body receive in educational endeavors } 

Before passing to this phase of the subject, there 
are two matters that have naturally occurred, doubt- 
less, to the mind of the reader that are associated 
with, but not relevant to, the immediate discussion 
in hand. The first is the obscure problem in physio- 
logical psychology, as to just what the ultimate con- 
nection is between nervous energy being set free in 
the brain and the processes in consciousness. Here 
one may read to advantage a recent admirable sum- 
mary of the positions that are held.^ 

^ Stout, " Manual of Psychology," Introduction, Chap. III. 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 67 

The second matter is the simple converse of the The influ- 
question we have been considering, viz., How does the on^go^^^"^ 
mind influence the body ? The unity which exists in 
the individual composed of mind and body should 
show itself in this way also. In brief, there are three 
ways in which this influence discovers itself to our 
common thinking. First, mental states, such as grief, 
anxiety, fear, dread, depression, prevent the normal 
functioning of the organs of the body, such as diges- 
tion. These states, indeed, are partly physical in 
origin, if not, as Professor James holds, wholly so. 
Opposite mental states, like excitement, exhilaration, 
may accelerate the normal functioning. The body 
reverberates, as it were, with unusual states of con- 
sciousness. Thus it appears that functional dis- 
orders, like insomnia, but not organic disorders, like 
cancer, can be caused or cured by mental influence 
on the body. Again, mental activity uses up nervous 
energy, which has to be replenished ; and finally, in 
all selected action the body is the servant of the 
mind. The body acts in response to those ideas 
which are uppermost in consciousness, or which ex- 
clusively occupy its focus to the inhibition of con- 
tradictory ideas. 

Let us pass from these related but not pertinent The Atten- 
points to our second question, viz., Seeing the influ- ^^mM^^^^^ 
ence of the body through the brain on the mind, what receive, 
consequent attention should the brain and body re- 
ceive in order to fullest mental efficiency .!* What 
has already been said shows at once the necessity for 
a fount of pure blood supply, of air with oxygen in it, 
and of sleep and recreation. Further, it is to be 



68 The Philosophy of Education 

Mental noted that exercise of the brain is normal and, in- 

°^ ' deed, necessary to its growth. It is as natural to 

work when we have rested as to rest when we have 
worked. Teaching children is not an artificial, but a 
natural, stimulus to the growth of their brain. So 
long as the brain's power is not over-taxed, teaching 
is not, and should not be considered, a severe artifice 
by either teacher or pupil. The body itself is healthier 
when the brain is being exercised in moderation. 
Rest for the brain is not so much the cessation of 
mental activity, which is impossible during waking 
consciousness, as its diminution or change, as in 
absorbing games. 

Brain Rest While stressing mental work as good for brain de- 

velopment, it is important to recognize the physio- 
logical fact that brains can be over-taxed, resulting in 
temporary, if not permanent, suspension of mental 
work. Fatigue is the first symptom. The attention 
wanders, the expenditure of nervous energy is greater 
than the supply. He has already worked too long 
who has to whip himself to further work. After 
fatigue, headache is the next symptom, and continu- 
ous over-work without periods of recuperation means 
certain nervous breakdown. The dangers from over- 
strain are greatest during the period of most rapid 
growth, during which time the developing body de- 
mands most of the nutrition. If the brain consumes 
it, the body suffers arrested development, and so 
involves ultimately undesirable results both to brain 
and mind. Precocious children need to be restrained 
rather than pushed. Real greatness cannot exist 
before adolescence. The teacher can never afford to 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 69 

forget that the youngest life is mainly nutritive, that 
boys and girls are concerned primarily with sensa- 
tions and movements, that only young men and 
maidens are approaching fulness of brain power, and 
that at all times our store of mental energy is not 
unlimited. The teacher should become generally in- 
formed of the brain capacity of individual pupils by 
observing their real powers of attention, and see that 
no child is over-taxed, that no willing child over-exerts 
himself, and that the capable indolent child is stimu- 
lated. The average child among the younger pupils 
in American public schools is beyond doubt being 
over-worked. The enriching of the curriculum, the 
nervousness attending examinations, the rigidity of 
promotions, the general ignorance of the amount of 
brain work a growing child ought to do, all are men- 
aces to the physical well-being of growing school 
children. The students of child nature say that a 
seven-year-old child should not study over two hours 
a day, a nine-year-old may study three hours, a twelve- 
year-old four. Herbert Spencer sounded the tocsin 
of war a generation ago against our inattention to the 
wants of the body in his famous chapter on Physical 
Education, showing that children are under-fed, not 
well clothed, and over-worked. 

With growth of the brain during the school period Respect for 
goes growth in the intellectual and moral powers, and gj-lin^""^*^ °^ 
the considerate teacher will limit the demands made Capacity. 
upon the child to its present brain capacity. During 
the kindergarten period, indeed from the years one to 
seven, the dominant conscious life is that of sensation 
and movement ; during the period of the elementary 



70 The Philosophy of Education 

schools, from the years seven to fourteen, the dominant 
conscious life is that of the imagination, memory, and 
that kind of understanding which likes to perceive 
relationships between things ; during the secondary 
school period, from the years fourteen to eighteen, 
the mind begins to see the relativity of all things to 
all things through the use of the reason ; and in the 
college period, from the years eighteen to twenty-two, 
the powers of reason are perfected in some kind of 
single vision of truth and reality. Without this finally 
reached real world-view, the end of a liberal education 
has not been completely attained Demands made 
by teachers upon pupils should be limited to their 
present brain and mental development, as indicated 
by the appearance of these increasing powers of con- 
sciousness during the school career. Methods of 
instruction should just keep pace with mental growth, 
and neither forge ahead nor lag behind. 
Suggestions To avoid ovcr-taxing the brain, frequent rests, re- 
cesses, short recitations, and changes of brain exercise 
are to be recommended. The description of the ner- 
vous system showed us that the brain centres of sen- 
sation are not those of movement ; then for rest for 
the brain let intellectual work and free movements 
about the room relieve each other. Even is it true 
that different centres of the brain are exercised by 
different subjects of study ; the subjects appeahng to 
the sense of sight, or object lessons, may well be re- 
lieved by those appealing to the ear, like music ; while 
those requiring thought, like mathematics and lan- 
guage, may profitably be followed by those requiring 
movements as well as thought, like drawing. 



for Brain 
Rest. 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 71 

The first intimation to the teacher that the pupil 
needs rest is fatigue.^ The appearance of fatigue 
indicates three things, viz., that nervous energy is 
being utilized more rapidly than produced, that there 
is local waste in the parts mainly active, and that 
there is a general clogging of cells and tissues. The 
first of these three elements is most vital. Concern- 
ing the causes of fatigue, the first and obvious one, of 
course, is long-continued work. Apart from this, the 
teacher himself, as tests actually show, is the most 
responsible factor either in producing or in delaying 
the appearance c-- fatigue. Thirdly, of the causes, 
certain school subjects are in themselves fatiguing, 
such as gymnastics, mathematics, and foreign lan- 
guages, mentioned from the first in fatiguing power. 
Certain other school subjects are recuperative, such 
as drawing, singing, mother-tongue, history, geog- 
raphy, and, perhaps, natural science, arranged in a 
descending scale. For brain rest school programmes 
should alternate the fatiguing and recuperative sub- 
jects. 

The physical nature of school children is a fact to study of the 
be observed and considered. It was largely disre- ^wiT^^ 
garded until the problems of modern city schools, 
such as warming and ventilating, elevated the impor- 
tance of the question to that of first rank. Both the 
problem and the way of getting at its solution, to- 
gether with admirable practical hints concerning the 
physical peculiarities of children, are delightfully set 
forth in Dr. Rowe's recent discussion.^ To convince 

1 Consult Sadler, " Reports," Vol. IX, p. 527 and ff. 

2 « The Physical Nature of the Child." 



72 The Philosophy of Education 

us of our inattention to this problem, he calls upon 
teachers to answer off-hand such questions as these : 

" Can all the children see all the blackboard ? Are 
any straining their eyes by holding their books at an 
improper distance ? Are any partially deaf ? Are the 
slow ones incapable or diseased or lazy ? Do they sit 
and stand correctly ? Should the same degree of pre- 
cision be expected from all ? What are the causes of 
paleness ? Do the children know the principles of 
hygiene essential for health? Are disposition and 
temperament considered ? What work is done by 
each pupil out of school ? and what kind ? Do they 
exercise enough ? Which ones have defects in the 
vocal organs, and what attention do these receive ? " 

Teachers will find their higher problems easier in 
proportion as they are ^successful in solving these 
lower and basic ones. 

These things, then, indicate what attention the 
body and brain should receive in educational ways. 
Physical education, meaning proper attention to the 
body and the brain, is necessary both in itself and 
because it makes a sound mind possible. Spencer 
quotes a suggestive writer as saying, *' The first requi- 
site to success in life is ' to be a good animal.' " Cer- 
tain it is that the ages of asceticism, of scorn for the 
body and its natural impulses, are the unstriking ones 
in the progress of civilization. And Juvenal's famous 
phrase, mens sana in corpore sano, is adopted by Locke 
and other moderns as containing a lasting principle. 
TheAtten- Having considered the influence of the body on 

ii°recdv^ng^ the mind, and the attention it consequently should 
receive, it is proper now to turn to our third question, 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 73 

and ask, What are the agencies in our schools to-day 
that make for physical education ? These are four, 
viz., manual training, play, gymnastics, and athletics. 
Let us consider these in succession. 

Manual training stands for other things, as we Manual 
shall see, than physical education, but it stands for framing, 
this, too. That which furnishes opportunity for self- 
expression is that which educates. Manual training 
is an opportunity for self-expression in material forms. 
Many boys find themselves in wood and metal and 
clay when not in books, and the training of the hand 
thus secured is also a training of the brain and of the 
mind. The hand, indeed, is the mind's greatest 
executive. Manual training stands for a specialized 
form of that sensory and motor training which we 
saw underhes and conditions the finest fruits of 
mental culture. Among its immediate results may 
be noted a coordination of mind and hand ; an extra 
ability in the material execution of ideas ; a removal ^ 
of awkwardness ; the formation of mental and moral 
habits of accuracy, precision, and honesty; and a 
realization of the dignity of labor. The basis of 
civilization is and must ever remain the material, and 
it is an educational effect of no small significance or 
value to be in sympathetic touch with the working 
world. 

In the curriculum manual training furnishes needed 
change from mental to physical employment, counter- 
balances the emphasis laid upon intellectual develop- 
ment, proceeds in method from the simple through 
the complex to the unit, and makes education more 
practical. It is a part of the new educational en- 



74 The Philosophy of Education 

deavor, to make the body a readier and more delicate 
servant of the mind and to make all arts artistic, in 
accord with the new movement in industry of beautify- 
ing the common. Its mission is not to supplant, but 
to supplement the older mental disciplines. The best 
educational results will be obtained when the pupil's 
attention is bent on the character of his work, rather 
than on the proceeds from its sale. 

Rousseau, foreseeing the French Revolution, advo- 
cated the learning of a trade by every boy, that when 
upheavals came in society he might be independent. 
So Emile was a cabinet-maker. To-day the purpose 
of manual training is, on the other hand, primarily 
educational, rather than utilitarian. In the Elmira 
Reformatory it plays a prominent part in the cor- 
rective discipline of the institution. Actually to-day 
manual training has its place mainly in the secondary 
schools in the educational system. It is desirable 
here, particularly for those intending to make some 
form of mechanics a profession ; but for the best 
educational results, its real place is in the grammar 
grades, from the years seven to fourteen, while the 
development of the brain is most rapidly progressing. 
Play. Second, play. The recognition of the service of 

play in education and in life is, omitting the Greeks, 
modern. Froebel ("Education of Man," 1826) has 
done most in establishing its educational value, and 
Groos in interpreting its real significance. We shall 
have to consider the nature of play, its explanation, 
and its function in education. 
The Nature Play Stands in contrast with work. The subjection 
of Play. q£ ^j^g individual to the demands that the environ- 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 75 

ment makes on him is work. The spontaneous 
physical expression of individuality is play. Work is 
always for some ulterior end to be attained ; play is 
always for its own sake. Work may or may not be 
agreeable ; play is always pleasant. Work is serious ; 
play is light. In work the universal self dominates ; 
in play, the particular private self. In the philosophi- 
cal language of Dr. Harris, " In work the individual 
surrenders himself to the service of a universal want 
or necessity of society, which has created a vocation 
or calling. Man gives up his particular, special likes 
and desires in work. He sacrifices ease and momen- 
tary convenience for rational (universal) ends. He 
adopts the social order. In play, on the other hand, 
he gives full rein to the individual whim or caprice. 
In play his activity is wholly turned toward his own 
immediate gratification. After work, in which he 
sacrifices his private particular inclinations for society 
and for rational ends, comes play, in which he returns 
to his individuality and relaxes this tension of work. 
He regains his feeling of self in play, because in play 
immediate inclination alone guides his activity, and 
thus the particular self is the impelHng principle, and 
also the immediate object of it." ^ 

Play is the method the individual takes in preserv- 
ing himself and his freedom. It protects him from 
the loss of himself in his labor. It keeps the springs 
of personal being ever fresh and flowing. A holiday 
reveals and gratifies a pupil's interests, or a man's, 
as a work-day does not. That man has worked too 
long who no longer can enjoy a holiday. He is 

i Harris, " Psychologic Foundations of Education," p. 283. 



Play. 



76 The Philosophy of Education 

no longer the master of his work, but has become 
its servant. 

The Expia- The explanation of play is not so easy to find as its 
nation of nature. Any theory that aims to be adequate must 
account for the following facts, viz., that most ani- 
mals play ; that each kind of animal has its own list 
of plays ; that they play instinctively and do not have 
to be taught, though some games are learned by 
imitation; and that there is an element of "make- 
believe " in play, as when the dog pretends to be bit- 
ing the master's hand, or the children "play house." 
The theories that would explain play are many ; the 
main ones are three. 

The surplus-energy theory maintains that play is a 
vent for superfluous vitality. This theory is associated 
with the names of Schiller in Germany and Spencer 
in England. There is an element of truth in it. For 
example, children play when they need no recreation, 
and athletics drains an institution of exuberant animal 
spirits which otherwise might flow in bad channels. 
But this theory does not contain the full truth, for 
children and animals and men play when they have no 
superfluous energy, as in some of the rhythmic games 
of children. And why should the different kinds of 
animals have instinctively different plays ? And we 
should expect, further, that so widespread a phenom- 
enon as play had some deeper significance in the 
process of evolution than this negative function of an 
exhaust drain. 

The recreation theory maintains that play is for 
the relaxation and recreation of exhausted powers. It 
is associated with the name of Lazarus in Germany. 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 77 

The tightened strings of the instrument must be 
loosened. It is true that the same game may furnish 
both relaxation and recreation, as tennis lets loose the 
motor energies penned up in study and tones up the 
brain's power for work. Play does recreate, but there 
is not always need of recreation when there is play. 

The practice theory, associated with the name of 
Groos in Germany and Baldwin in America, main- 
tains that play is preparatory to the tasks of life. 
" In child's play opportunity is given to the animal, 
through the exercise of inborn dispositions, to 
strengthen and increase his inheritance in the acqui- 
sition of adaptations to his complicated environment, 
— an achievement which would be unattainable by 
mere mechanical instinct alone. The fact that youth 
is, par excellence^ the period of play, is in thorough 
harmony with this theory." ^ Or, more briefly, " Play 
is the agency employed to develop crude powers and 
prepare them for life's uses."^ Or, as Baldwin ex- 
presses it, plays " exercise the young animals in the 
very activities, though in a playful manner, in which 
they must seriously engage later on in life." ^ Thus, 
youthful play is nature's way of preparation for later 
serious living. The kitten's ball is the old cat's 
mouse. The little mountain goat on the plains in 
play still jumps up and down, while the fawn whose 
later life is to be on the plains, jumps straightaway 
distances. The girl's doll and the boy's soldier and 
horses are premonitory. The main education of early 

1 Karl Groos, "The Play of Man," p. 2. 

2/3zV.,p. 375. 

3 "The Story of the Mind," p. 48. 



78 The Philosophy of Education 

life comes to the child through play. It is nature's 
schooling and should be supplemented, not interfered 
with, by man's schooling. 
TheFunc The function that play performs in education is 

tion of Play. |^^^ ^ ^^^^ ^£ what it docs in life. Nations play as 
well as individuals, and their games and festivals dis- 
cover deep-lying national interests. Dr. Harris has 
shown that the Greek games at Olympia are a revela- 
tion of the Greek devotion to beauty of the physical 
body ; that the Roman gladiatorial contests display 
the sacrifice of the individual to the good or the 
pleasure of Rome, upon which principle the empire 
was founded ; that the Mardi Gras in America dis- 
plays the American idea of the equality of all men 
and the vanity of insignia ; but that plays are not so 
prominent in America because our very form of 
government permits that freedom to the individual 
which play is designed to secure. 

Play also explains art. All art is due to the play 
of the productive imagination. Here the play is of 
the mind and no longer of the body. Groos calls 
artistic enjoyment "that highest and most valuable 
form of adult play." Art is conscious self-illusion, — 
we surrender to the picture, the story, or the statue, 
as though it were real. Art thus goes back to the 
*' make-believe " consciousness present in so much 
play. 

In the school the place of play is fundamental 
beside work. It affords the necessary reaction from 
work and preserves the individuality of the pupil. 
It, and not calisthenics, is the true rest from work. 
Without it, a return to work with zest is impossible. 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 79 

Its educational effects in the way of unintended 
preparation for later living is incalculable. This is 
particularly true in England, where play may be said 
to be a national institution. Play justifies the recess, 
which should bring a change of scene and air, and 
which is a valuable example of what Rousseau 
would call the noble art of losing time. Play explains 
many student pranks against each other, the faculty, 
and the town. Much mischief is not serious at all, 
but only the pupil's natural and individualistic reaction 
to school restraints. Such frivolous infringements 
of school order should be carefully distinguished 
from serious attacks upon it, when it is a ques- 
tion of management. The demand for pleasure, 
so natural and strong in children, and so forcefully 
declared by Luther, is met by play in the school, fur- 
nishing, as it does, opportunity for the pupil to follow 
his own bent. 

But as the school must not work at play, so must it 
be said that it must not play at work. To do every- 
thing playfully is to remain a child. The school must 
teach the child to do his duty, even if it is against his 
inclination. Nor must children be deceived into 
working under the guise of play, which confusedly 
mixes opposite elements in life. Yet the work, as 
work, may be made so attractive that they will love 
to do it. Indeed, the highest and noblest kind of 
work has this element of play in it, this element of 
joy in the activity for its own sake. Play in work is 
very different from play at work. Hence it is not 
desirable to have the school run on the sense of duty 
alone. The work itself should be so compelling in 



8o The Philosophy of Education 

interest that it is freely willed, and that the element 
of drudgery is largely lacking. That school is a 
prison-house where the stern mistress of law alone 
rules unenlivened by the perfect law of liberty. 

A last service of the impulse of play in the school 
is that of socializing the individual, developing disin- 
terestedness through the performance of something 
for its own sake, and cultivating the moral personal- 
ity in games that at any rate must be played fair. 
The very aim of developing freedom of the personal 
spirit is thwarted where teachers are officious in the 
pupils' games. 

As indicated at the outset, Froebel and the kinder- 
gartners are the true educational interpreters of play 
as one of the child's highest modes of self-expression. 
" We should not consider play as a frivolous thing," 
says Froebel; "on the contrary, it is a thing of pro- 
found significance. ... By means of play the child 
expands in joy as the flower expands when it proceeds 
from the bud ; for joy is the soul of all the actions of 
that age." In fact, in the kindergarten play is con- 
verted into systematic teaching, skilfully suggesting 
as it does aims of action and objects of study. The 
kindergarten is supervised play ; in it the community 
sense is developed ; children of the same age playing 
and working together here develop unselfishness and 
their social natures in a way impossible in the home 
with children of different ages and the youngest the 
object of central interest. With its basic principle of 
self-development through self-activity, the kindergar- 
ten is particularly serviceable to that type of child 
which is naturally timid, undemonstrative, and inac- 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 8i 

tive. As children outgrow the kindergarten, the work 
impulse must appear increasingly prominent. Play 
remains, but not as the sole spring of action. The 
community life of the kindergarten is a true basis of 
all later education. The practically uniform report is 
that children who grow through the play of the kin- 
dergarten do better the work of the grammar grades. 

The discussion of play as a factor in physical edu- 
cation illustrates how arbitrary are our distinctions 
of education into physical and mental. Education 
is really one, and physical education is an aspect of 
the whole, and not an entity, but an abstraction, in 
itself. As Schiller says, " a man is fully human only 
when he plays " ; so it can be said that a man is fully 
educated only when his body is developed, yet his 
body cannot be developed without touching his mind 
at many points. Certainly play brings out the bodily 
powers, and perhaps dominantly does so, but its in- 
fluence is coterminous with education itself. 

Sometimes the needed physical exercise that play 
naturally gives has to be artificially secured by con- 
scious direction, in which case we have gymnastics, 
the third element of physical education in our schools 
to-day. 

Third, gymnastics. As Herbert Spencer says, Gymnastics, 
gymnastics is "factitious exercise," it is consciously 
directed physical exercise. The element of spon- 
taneity and freedom is less than in play, gymnastics 
requiring a mental strain and the exercise of will 
power. Mechanical gymnastics is inferior to play, 
being more fatiguing and less interesting. Play has 
the invigoration that always accompanies the agree- 



82 The Philosophy of Education 

able. Spirited gymnastics, however, is superior to 
play for physical development, because of the attention 
given to all parts of the body. Spencer shows, how- 
ever, that play also provides evenly distributed exer- 
cise of the body. Gymnastics is decidedly not an 
end in itself, but a means to an end ; the purpose 
being not to make gymnasts, but strong physical 
men. It should be particularly directed toward devel- 
oping weak points and correcting any physical de- 
fects of the body, requiring as it does special physical 
apparatus. Gymnastics of a simple kind is espe- 
cially valuable for girls, necessitating proper modes of 
clothing, securing to the body its natural strength, 
and giving poise to body and mind. No one thing is 
more encouraging for the future physical welfare of 
Americans than the present large and growing inter- 
est on the part of our young women in all kinds of 
indoor and outdoor bodily exercise. While the home 
is still their peculiar sphere, the house is no longer 
their prison. 

The direct aim of all artificial physical exercise is 
the reaching and the keeping of the normal size and 
strength of the main tissues, the acquiring of correct 
and economical habits of nervous and muscular activ- 
ity, the development of the motor areas of the brain, 
and the giving of the mind powers of easy direction 
over the body. Through the right kind of physical 
culture the nerve centres are organized and the body 
becomes what it should be, — the ready and accurate 
expression of the mind, the material that manifests 
the mental. Culture of the body aims to make it 
the fit bearer of a cultured mind. The tangible re- 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 83 

suits of gymnastic exercise during the period of plas- 
ticity are increased weight and height and strength. 
Gymnastics is a good supplementary agency to play 
in physical education, and should be required in the 
educational system, at least through the adolescent or 
secondary school period, if not the first part of the 
time in college, of all students not regularly engaged 
in other forms of bodily exercise, as athletics. This 
brings us to a consideration of the last regular mode 
of physical education, which, like the trust in the 
political world, is a contemporary problem, and neces- 
sitates regulation. 

Fourth, athletics. In the beginning it is to be Athletics. 
observed that athletics has been the cause of a gen- 
eral alarm out of all proportion to its danger or its 
importance in education. Athletics has been, and is 
in no immediate danger of becoming other than a 
simple and natural by-play in the course of American 
education. The vexed fretting at its presence, the 
conspicuous place it occupies in the illustrated and 
unillustrated press, the printing of cuts of boys and 
unremarkable players, all serve to magnify unduly its 
importance, and to give it a place in the public eye 
out of all proportion to the place it really occupies in 
our educational institutions. 

Athletics is playing to win. There is the general 
consciousness, however, that it is better to lose fairly 
than to win unfairly. The fact that a fairly won 
victory over a worthy rival is the goal, is the secret 
of the life of athletics. The success here is unquali- 
fied; the game is lost or won. There is a square 
estimate of comparative strength, with a clear and 



84 The Philosophy of Education 

irrevocable decision. Usually, life provides us with 
qualified successes or partial defeats. In athletics 
the victory and defeat are each absolute. This final- 
ity about the result explains both the animus for the 
game and the feelings accompanying the outcome. 
Athletics introduces the element of emulation in 
games. It differs from gymnastics in that the latter 
is mainly for the individual, with health in view; while 
athletics is mainly for teams, with victory in view. 
This associated play gains in attractiveness over the 
isolated. In athletics, again, as differing from gym- 
nastics, one specializes in his position, and exerts him- 
self beyond what is necessary for physical exercise. 

The development of athletics into national promi- 
nence is a matter of one generation. Before the 
Civil War college athletics consisted in rowdyism, play- 
ing practical jokes on the faculty, attending cock-fights, 
engaging in disreputable prize-fights, and sometimes 
in untrained boat-racing. To-day a big intercollegi- 
ate athletic contest means a multitude of spectators 
and the expenditure of a fortune of money. Har- 
vard's athletics for the season of 1 900-1 901 netted 
nearly ^40,000, being an increase of about ^12,500 
over the preceding year, the total receipts of the year 
being over ^117,000. For some, though less than 
a majority, of college students, athletic sports occupy 
a competing place with scholarship on the one hand, 
and with social intercourse on the other. What is 
to be our attitude toward the part that athletics plays 
in physical education ? 

Actually the attitude is now one of disapproval, or 
of approval, or of suspended judgment. The number 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 85 

composing the last is considerable. Those who dis- 
approve of modern athletics urge, in summary, four 
objections, viz., it provides exercise for the few while 
the many look on, it carries the idea of amusement to 
excess in the serious work of getting an education, 
it discourages scholarship, and it disturbs morals. 
There are grounds, and often too good grounds, for 
these objections ; but those who make them must bear 
in mind the considerable replies made by those who 
favor athletics. The many who sit on the bleachers 
smoking, or lie idling around, really have recourse to, 
and to some extent use, gymnastics, play, and out-of- 
door hours for exercise. Further, a careful computa- 
tion of the men in the average college who at some 
time in their course have undergone training for 
some team will actually show about fifty per cent. 
At Harvard the percentage of players is larger. 
President Eliot writes, ^' It is reasonable to suppose 
that at least two thousand students out of the thirty- 
five hundred in Cambridge take some active part in 
one or more of the thirteen sports in which an enu- 
meration of the number of participants was made." ^ 
These facts indicate that athletic sports benefit de- 
cidedly more than the few they are given credit for. 
The second objection, that athletic contests pro- 
vide excessive amusement, that the time and atten- 
tion devoted to this kind of entertainment js out of 
proportion to its relative value in life, is considerable. 
The physical, though valuable beyond estimate, is 
indeed not the most valuable thing in life, and that 

1 Reports of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College, 
1901-1902, p. 41. 



86 The Philosophy of Education 

youthful student's interest which is centred primarily 
in athletic contests is certainly misplaced. And 
recent investigations tend to show that the college 
athlete attains a distinction in life slightly below the 
average of his class.^ Yet one wonders if, as a na- 
tion, the American people have enough play in their 
life. Is not the world still too much with us, with its 
busy and ponderous pursuits overwhelming individu- 
ality .■* The world of matter and of commerce might 
certainly become less wearing on our nervous mech- 
anism were the play element introduced more largely 
into our society through the infusion of an element 
trained to appreciate its real place in life. The small 
Greek nation, as a whole, once in four years cele- 
brated athletic contests, under which the arts of 
poetry, of sculpture, and of religion flourished. The 
original of the Apollo is not that god, but some oily 
Greek youth on the sandy plains under the shadow 
of Olympus by the banks of the Alphaeus. In 
America to-day the arts, due to play, are not keep- 
ing pace with the sciences, due to work. The busy 
American needs what Professor James calls "the 
gospel of relaxation," and athletics, duly placed 
among the educational influences, will forward this 
interest. 

The third objection, that athletic games discourage 
scholarship, wants proof. It is true that these games 
consume vital energy that might be given to study; 
but it is doubtful if it would be, were there no ath- 
letics. It is also true that athletics furnishes an 

1 A. Lawrence Lowell : " College Rank and Distinction in Life." 
Atlantic Monthly , October, 1903. 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 87 

interest often more compelling to participants than 
books ; but it is doubtful if books would receive any 
larger attention from these particular men, were there 
no competing athletics. Time, it is true, is required 
for athletic sports ; but only so much time under any 
conditions can be given to study. A few athletes are 
fine scholars, be it said, showing that the two things 
are not inherently contradictory. It is doubtless true 
that the scholarship of athletes falls but little more 
short, if any, of their ability than that of other stu- 
dents. On the whole, the conflict between the claims 
of scholarship and athletics is rather a matter for 
regulation than for the condemnation of athletics. It 
is easy to require athletes to maintain a certain stand- 
ard of scholarship, and thus the problem is actually 
solved in certain institutions where otherwise it would 
be gravest. With the growing differentiation between 
the college and the university, it is necessary to recog- 
nize that the college student is not yet the scholar 
with specialized interests that he may become, but is 
just the universal man, with all the natural human inter- 
ests weaving the web of his life. Before athletics came 
to occupy its present prominent place in education, 
the college student was supposed to be a monument 
of erudition, whose body shadowed forth in pallid face 
and attenuated figure his nights of groping for the 
light of knowledge. To-day, athletic contests, re- 
enforced by other agencies as human, have trans- 
formed this college student into a college man of 
superb physical strength, of applicable mental fur- 
nishing, and with all the interests of real life at heart. 
Not since the days of universal Greeks has there 



88 The Philosophy of Education 

been such an illustration of the simply human as that 
shown by the college man to-day. 

The fourth objection, that athletic sports demor- 
alize, is partly true. The athletic record is stained by 
betting on the big games, by carousal often in celebra- 
tion of great victories, and by the sacrifice of days to 
the prophecy and history of games from which recov- 
ery of interest in study is a slow and painful process. 
But this evil is not unmitigated. Another phase of 
the truth is that athletic interests advance morals. 
The student body has been taken out of itself and 
made to appreciate strength and courage and virility 
and skill as virtues, and a loyal disinterested devotion 
to one's institution has been developed. And the 
capacity for a disinterested devotion is an element in 
the highest success, service, and happiness in life. 

The positive case for the maintenance of the pres- 
ent position of athletics as an agency of physical 
education may be briefly put from three points of 
view, the physical, the intellectual, and the moral. 
First, athletic contests develop physical strength, force, 
power, agility, dexterity, ease, grace, and swiftness. 
The record in after life of American football men and 
Oxford oars shows a vitality decidedly above the aver- 
age. The fatalities in football have been advertised 
beyond their significance, occurring as they do mainly 
at the opening of the season and with unskilled play- 
ers, though temporary injuries are numerous. The 
actual number of fatalities in football, the world over, 
is reported as less than in any other sport except ten- 
nis, skating, golf, and boxing. Second, athletics de- 
velop certain desirable intellectual qualities, such as 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 89 

quickness, alertness, self-knowledge, and the ability 
to think in a crisis. Third, they develop the moral 
qualities of self-control, self-reliance, force, endurance, 
courage, the sense of the value of training, the disci- 
pline of defeat, if not humility in victory, the sense 
of the value of concerted action, nerve, practicality, 
and will power. Football, the most objectionable of 
athletic sports, is the prince of games in moral qual- 
ity. Its team, which is an organized unit, is the finest 
training in associated effort. 

Those who favor athletic amusements and are in- 
clined to look into the future for some of the justi- 
fying effects which have followed in their wake in the 
past, point to the time when this devotion to the physi- 
cal nature of man may generate another age of art, 
when to know and to reverence the physical frame of 
man will lead to its permanent and beautiful embodi- 
ment in fitting forms. As the lamented President 
Walker says in concluding his discussion on "College 
Athletics,"^ "The vision of the Apollo may yet rise 
to the view of thousands out and up from the arena 
at Springfield, as erst it rose before the thronging 
multitudes of Olympia." 

In summarizing our attitude of qualified approval 
toward athletics, the conclusion of President Eliot's 
discussion of this subject, mentioned above, must be 
quoted, " Such are some of the evils that attend the 
prevaiHng exaggeration of athletic sports ; but when- 
ever the evils consequent upon this exaggeration are 
mentioned, it should also be mentioned that the out- 
door sports on the average and in the mass do more 

1 "Discussions in Education," p. 285. 



90 The Philosophy of Education 

good than harm ; for they promote vigorous physical 
development, and provide invaluable safeguards against 
effeminacy and vice." ^ 

Play, gymnastics, and athletics stand to each other 
in supplementary rather than contradictory relations. 
They take their turns in serving best the interests of 
physical education. During the period of infancy, 
say the first seven or eight years of life, the larger 
neuro-muscular combinations must be developed, and 
play performs this function. During the elementary 
period, say the second seven years of life, the finer 
neuro-muscular adjustments, unreached by play, and 
the all-round development of the physical system 
must be secured, for which gymnastics is peculiarly 
adapted. During the secondary and higher school 
periods specialization in physical training is in order, 
to which aim athletics lends itself. Of course these 
periods and their corresponding agencies for physical 
development overlap to some extent. 

Because the pupil is a psycho-physical integer, 
these same agencies likewise best serve the interests 
of mental education when so arranged. There is a 
neat parallelism between what each ag>ency in its 
period does for the body and what the mind educa- 
tionally needs. Play occupies the mind with sensa- 
tions and movements ; gymnastics supports the idea 
of all-round development, the foundations of which 
are laid in the elementary school ; athletics specialize 
physically as the higher school periods do mentally. 
Thus play, gymnastics, and athletics have places and 
values relatively to each other. 

1 "Discussions in Education," p. 41. 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 91 

This concludes the discussion of the actual agencies The Atten- 
of physical education in the American school system ha^recefved^ 
of to-day. A brief glance at the history of physical in the Past, 
education will serve to show the tortuous ascending 
and descending path by which it has come into its 
present substantial prominence, will put its present 
position in historic relief, and will guarantee to it no 
waning future. 

In ancient Persia, under Cyrus the foremost nation 
of earth, the youth were educated by the state for the 
state in its military campaigns. The youth were 
trained in gymnastics and military tactics, and, next 
to moral rectitude, physical strength was held to be 
useful to men. 

Among the Greeks, who perhaps borrowed certain 
of their ideas concerning physical training from the 
Persians, gymnastics received a development second 
to none, unless it be that of our own time. They 
excelled in combining play and physical exercise. 
The Spartan child, if ill-formed physically at birth, 
was exposed. As a youth he endured hardships of 
hunger and cold, in order to become an efficient sol- 
dier. The Spartan girls have the distinction of being 
the first women in the history of education to receive 
physical training. This included gymnastics, run- 
ning, and jumping, and was intended to make them 
the mothers of hardy men. In advocating in his 
*' Republic " similar physical training for girls and 
boys, Plato was influenced by the Spartan ideals. 

In Athens, the gymnastic training took the direc- 
tion of beauty, rather than strength, of body. The 
world has never elsewhere seen such devotion to 



92 The Philosophy of Education 

athletic contests as in the Isthmian and Olympic 
games. These were the occasion of Greece's largest 
assemblies, and by them they reckoned their chro- 
nology. The principal events were throwing the 
discus, running, jumping, wrestling, and chariot- 
racing. The laurel-crowned victor was a hero all his 
life, was carved into marble by a Phidias, written into 
verse by a Pindar, and honored by posterity as a god. 

Rome, like Sparta, was more practical in its physi- 
cal training and prepared for war. The Romans were 
the first to encourage professionalism in games, pre- 
ferring for the most part personally to be lookers-on 
rather than participants. A Roman youth could 
throw the dart, ride, box, swim, and endure extremes 
of temperature. Juvenal's classic phrase, mens sana 
in corpore sano, is now become a commonplace. 

With the first centuries of Christianity physical 
education went into a decline, though its roots were 
too deep-lying to be finally extirpated. The body was 
considered the prison-house of the soul, against whose 
bars of sin the soul beat and bruised itself in vain, 
struggling to be free. Man was a pilgrim to a 
heavenly home, and it was his vile body that was 
weighing him down and keeping him in bondage. 
Hence arose asceticism, a product of unearthliness, 
and inattention even to the natural needs of the 
body. St. Jerome, in writing to Laeta concerning 
the education of her daughter, advised against bath- 
ing and long hours of sleep at night. 

During the Middle Ages the sole exception to this 
general condemnation of the body was the physical 
education of the knight. The romantic institution 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 93 

of chivalry preserved the natural play instinct, so 
long done violence to, in games and knightly con- 
tests. As he followed his liege lord the education of 
the young knight was both physical and military. 
He was trained in the so-called seven free arts of the 
castle, viz., to ride, swim, shoot with bow and arrow, 
box, hawk, play chess, and write poetry. 

The modern thought about physical education was 
initiated in the sixteenth century by Frangois Rabe- 
lais (148 3-1 553). In his revolt against mediaevalism 
this great French satirist urged upon youth and 
monks the necessity of an hour's daily physical exer- 
cise in the open air, to be followed by proper ablu- 
tions. John Milton (i 608-1 674), in his famous 
*' Tractate on Education," says, "The exercise which 
I commend first is the exact use of weapons ; stu- 
dents must also be practised in all the locks and 
grips of wrestling, wherein Englishmen are wont to 
excel." John Locke (163 2- 1704), teacher, states- 
man, and philosopher, revives first among the moderns 
the ancient phrase of Juvenal, saying, " First a sound 
body, than a sound mind." Rousseau (1712-1778), 
the real destroyer in the eighteenth century and its 
greatest educational figure, permits nothing until 
Emile's twelfth year but physical development and 
training of the senses. Froebel (1782-185 2), the 
child's prophet, gave play a fundamental place in all 
education in his "Education of Man" (1826). He 
first used calisthenic exercises for the physical devel- 
opment of children. 

It was only the latter half of the nineteenth century 
that saw the general passage of mediaeval ideas about 



94 The Philosophy of Education 

the body and the growth of the conception that the 
schools were to make physical men as well as scholars. 
Herbert Spencer led the van of this last attack, and 
the English, to-day, are the great outdoor-play nation, 
with horsemanship, rowing, cricket, Rugby football, 
and golf. Germany prefers fencing for student exer- 
cise, and follows Froebel also in giving play a training 
place in education, though the kindergarten itself is 
almost expatriated. Gymnastics and military drill, 
the latter due to the Napoleonic regime and for the 
most part a failure, are the exercise of French stu- 
dents. In America the national game is baseball, 
strongly seconded by football, track athletics, and 
rowing. The movement for gymnastics began in 
1 86 1 with the erection of a gymnasium at Amherst, 
with compulsory daily attendance. The physical 
training of girls receives special attention in America, 
— Radcliffe College, for example, having had a gym- 
nasium before a dormitory. 

This, then, is the place occupied by physical educa- 
tion in the thought of the world to-day, as guaranteed 
by its historic growth, and herewith the argument of 
this chapter in its bearing on the general question of 
the nature of education may be reviewed. Because 
of the influence of the body on the mind as defined, 
because of the consequent attention the body and brain 
should receive, and indeed are actually receiving from 
certain school agencies to-day, and have received in the 
past, it is evident that we are justified in including 
physical development as a necessary element in our 
conception of education. The Introduction, in Chap- 
ter I, taught us to think of education fundamentally as 



t\ition of 
Education. 



The Physiological Aspect of Education 95 

development. *' The Biological Aspect of Education," 
in Chapter II, taught us to consider it primarily as the 
superior adjustment of a conscious human being to 
his environment. Now the ** Physiological Aspect of 
Education " teaches us that we cannot wisely neglect 
to conceive of it also as the development of the body. 
Including this last factor as an element in the defini- 
tion already reached in answer to the question. What 
is education ? we have the following. Education is second Defi- 
the superior adjustment to his environment of a physi- 
cally developed human being. 

We have seen that biologically and physiologically 
education provides the brain with individual and 
useful habits of reaction on the world's stimuH, that 
it adjusts the conscious human person in a superior 
fashion to his environment, and that it develops his 
bodily powers. The ultimate definition of education 
cannot say less than these things, though it may have 
to say more. The being to be educated, upon whose 
nature depends the nature of education, is character- 
ized not simply by life, with which biology can deal ; 
not simply by the physical form in which his life em- 
bodies itself, with which physiology can deal ; but also 
by companionship with his fellows, without which his 
nature cannot realize itself or grow toward complete- 
ness. That environment in the adjustment to which 
consists man's education must be capable of socializ- 
ing man's nature. The new question arises. What is 
the nature of that environment through adjustment 
to which man becomes educated } And what does 
the social nature of man require of education } The 
answers ta these questions must be found in the 



g6 The Philosophy of Education 

" Sociological Aspect of Education," to which we 
now turn. 

REFERENCES ON THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF 
EDUCATION 

Bain, Education as a Science, pp. 235-280. 

Baldwin, The Story of the Mind, pp. 43-51. 

Barnett, Common Sense in Education and Teaching, Chap. 
III. 

Bates, The Negative Side of Modern Athletics, Forum, May, 
1901. 

Burnham, Fed. Sem., Vol. II, pp. 17, 49? 67. 

Compayr^, Lectures on Pedagogy, Pt. I, Chap. II. 

Davis, Elementary Physiology, Chap. IX. 

Donaldson, The Growth of the Brain, Chap. XVIII. 

Groos, The Play of Animals ; The Play of Man. 

Ham, Mind and Hand. 

Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, Chap. XXXIV. 

Hartwell, Physical Training. In Report of United States 
Commissioner of Education, 1897-1898, Chap. XII. 

Hutchinson, Play as an Education. Cont. Rev., September, 
1903. 

Huxley, Elementary Physiology, Lessons I and XI. 

Laurie, Institutes of Education, Pt. I, Lee. III. 

Stout, Manual of Psychology, Introduction, Chap. III. 

Sadler, Reports, Vol. II, passim ; Vol. IX, p. 527 ff. 

Sully, The Teacher's Handbook of Psychology, Chap. III. 

Spencer, Education, Chap. IV. 

Walker, Discussions in Education, pp. 259 ef seq. 

Warner, The Study of Children, Chap. XII. 

Woodward, Manual Training. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF EDUCATION 

The term environment, in our present definition The Nature 
of education, requires exposition of us. What is the En^^on-^^^^ 
nature of the environment to which man in the pro- ment. 
cess of his education becomes adjusted ? This is our 
new question. A child begins his life in ignorance 
of himself and of his world ; he begins where primi- 
tive man began» Without educational assistance of 
some kind he must also live his life as primitive man 
did ; he must depend upon his own experience for 
the lessons he learns. But since primitive man not 
only learned his lessons but also taught them to his 
children, the experience of the human race has been 
accumulating with the passage of the historic genera- 
tions. It is this racial experience which constitutes 
the environment into which the latest child is born, 
and which gives him the handicap of the centuries 
over his primitive forbears. 

In brief, the environment of the pupil is the 
achievement of the race, to which he potentially be- 
longs, in the conquest of nature, in the movement of 
affairs, and in the knowledge of itself. It is a spirit- 
ual environment. The adjustment to this environ- 
ment, which is the race's life, discovers to the pupil 
his own social capacities ; he finds his own life in his 
H 97 



98 The Philosophy of Education 

race's life. This sharing of the race's life is education 
as viewed by sociology. In the language of President 
Butler, who first described education in these terms, 
** If education cannot be identified with mere instruc- 
tion, what is it ? What does the term mean ? 1 
answer, it must mean a gradual adjustment to the 
spiritual possessions of the race." ^ 

There is a special period in the life of each indi- 
vidual dedicated by nature to this process of adjust- 
ment. The first three years of a child's life are 
spent under the influence of the family and in getting 
possession of his body. The educational years, from 
three to twenty-six or more, are the special period of 
adjustment to his spiritual environment. 

The term spiritual, used in describing the environ- 
ment of man, is comprehensive and includes all the" 
relations in which man as a conscious being stands to 
his fellows, to what his fellows have done, and to his 
own personal ideals. It includes man's relation to 
Nature as itself the embodiment of ideas. Did not 
man find Nature intelligible and responsive to his- 
efforts to understand it, his relation thereto could 
not be included under the term spiritual. Its present 
inclusion in the spiritual environment to which man 
stands related intends by no means to settle the 
metaphysical question, whether nature ultimately is 
atoms in motion or an externalized form of mental 
energy, but only implies that no part of the environ- 
ment of man is finally foreign to him. Everywhere 
man finds himself reflected in the universe in which 
he lives. Its ultimate confines may be unknown to 

1 "The Meaning of Education," p. 17. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 99 

him, but he will not admit they are unknowable. To 
admit such would be to cripple his ultimate efforts at 
knowledge and comprehension, and would be to 
readmit the reign of mystery in his world, which he 
has been at such pains during ages of ceaseless effort 
to banish. In borrowing President Butler's happy 
epithet, then, and in describing the environment of 
man as spiritual, there is no unwarranted extension 
of the legitimate meaning of the term. It opens 
complete range to the present aspect of the dis- 
cussion. 

The question arises at once. How does man become The Method 
adjusted to this environment which his race has made °^j.^^ Pupil's 

•' ^ Adjustment 

and which is himself objectified, and which he him- to his Envi- 
self is potentially ? It is only by reproducing in his ^°^"^^^*- 
own mental history the mental history of the race. 
As biologists tell us that the human embryo in its 
development to physical maturity passes through the 
life history of organic forms, ontogeny repeating 
phylogeny, so must educators realize that the human 
mind in its educational development to mental matur- 
ity passes through the spiritual history of the race. 
Man, as himself a social being by nature, as a real 
part of an associated whole, reproduces in his own 
mental life the mental life of the race, and thereby 
becomes educated. Mental reproduction is the cause 
of education. The educated mind has been fertilized 
by the life of the world and is fruitful in its concep- 
tions. Education is giving birth to mental heirs, and 
Socrates, the first great teacher of the Greeks, well 
described his vocation as the art of intellectual mid- 
wifery. He assisted the mind in bringing forth its 

- 1 „ r .•^ 



lOO The Philosophy of Education 

ideas. Often the reproduction of the spiritual envi- 
ronment is barren repetition, the struggle of the 
world toward knowledge and art and liberty coming 
out of the mind as it went in, unassimilated, unappre- 
ciated, and unused. 

This production from within the mind of its own 
world in response to the stimulating effects of the 
world without is education as a process, as an activity. 
The youth thereby unifies himself with his race in the 
educational period, and becomes actually what he 
always was potentially. What his race has produced, 
he reproduces, and thus universalizes his individual 
nature and socializes his private impulses. Thus for 
him education is become the epitome of civilization. 
Education as Thus from the sociological point of view, educa- 
sodok)?v ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ reproduction of the spiritual environment. 
This aspect of education is called sociological because 
man, the reproducing agent, is social by nature, as 
Aristotle showed, and because the spiritual environ- 
ment which he reproduces is the product of the 
thought, feeling, and action of man in organized 
masses. In adjusting man to his actual environment, 
education performs a social function. Man is not 
himself alone, but his life is in relationship to his 
fellows. Man is not a social deposit, simply, but his 
life has its self-conscious centre in himself. The 
bringing of the individual into unifying relations with 
society is the function which education has to per- 
form. Hence this aspect of the discussion is called 
sociological. 

Having seen thus the nature of the environment as 
spiritual to which man must be adjusted in education, 



Sociology. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education loi 

and the method of this adjustment as reproduction, The Ques- 
we are prepared to open the three questions of the gocLifgkiai 
sociological aspect of education, viz.. What are the Discussion 
elements of the spiritual environment ? What are 
the social effects of its reproduction by individuals ? 
and finally. What practical consequences follow for 
education from this aspect of the discussion ? 

First, the elements of the spiritual environment. TheEie- 
This question calls for a more specific consideration spiritual En- 
of the nature of the environment called spiritual by vironment. 
which man is encircled. The elements in the spir- 
itual environment are three in number. The reason 
for this number lies in the nature of mind. The 
spiritual environment is the achievement of the mind 
of the race ; these elements are consequently declara- 
tory of the nature of the mind of the race ; but the 
racial mind is but the individual mind writ large : 
psychologists are agreed that the different ultimate 
modes of being conscious, the final phases of mental 
life, are three in number, viz., the mind knows, and 
feels, and wills, that is, it has an acquaintanceship 
with the external world in which it takes a certain 
pleasure or displeasure, and on which it works certain 
energetic reactions. Consequently the three elements 
of the spiritual environment are the intellectual, 
what is known ; the emotional, what is felt ; and the 
volitional, what is willed. Considering the objects of 
these mental activities, the mind knows truth and 
avoids error; it feels, as its highest object, beauty 
and avoids ugliness ; and it wills, in momentous issues, 
goodness and avoids evil. These are the natural 
points of impingement of the mind upon the external 



I02 The Philosophy of Education 

reality, with their foil-like, accompanying trail of the 
serpent, whatever that may finally be. Truth, beauty, 
and goodness, then, are the race's spiritual ideals, and 
the adjustment of the child to these essential realities 
that the history of the race has disclosed, is the task 
of supreme moment which is set for education. 











' Physics 






Geology 






Mineralogy 






Inorganic - 


Geography 
Physiography 
Chemistry 
. Astronomy 






■ Matter - 


. Organic 


- Biology 
Botany 
Zoology 
Physiology 
Anatomy 




■ Sciences . 




Anthropology 
Ethnology 
Sociology 
. Economics 








' Subjective 


Psychology 
' Logic 






. Mind 




Metaphysics 








Esthetics 


The Spiritual 




. Objective 


Ethics 


Environment - 




Language 


of the Pupil 




■ Mathematics 






' Architecture 








Sculpture 






Arts 


Painting 
Music 
Literature 
. Religion 






r History 






. Volitions - 


Constituti 


ons 





j La^ 
L Morals 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 103 

What is the nature of the intellectual environment The Nature 
of the child ? It is what is commonly called Science, °^f ^^^'^^-. 

-' ' lectual Envi- 

and is produced by the mind of the race in its at- ronment. 
tempt to understand the physical and mental world in 
which it lives. Science is a product of the effort of 
the mind to know the truth concerning reality. It is 
a resultant of intellectual activity interpreting the 
world. In the broadest sense of the term, science is 
knowledge. What divisions can be made in the knowl- 
edge which man has of his world ? That is, what 
are the sciences } 

The universe in which man lives contains, for prac- 
tical purposes of classification, matter and mind. This 
present division does not commit us in advance to 
dualism as the ultimate metaphysical point of view. 
Concerning each of these realities, man has attained 
and is attaining knowledge. They are first discovered 
by man in the order mentioned, first matter and then 
mind, by man who first looks outward and then in- 
ward. In the words of Tennyson, the people's poetic 
philosopher : — 

" The baby new to earth and sky, 

What time his tender palm is pressed 
Against the circle of the breast, 
Has never thought that this is I. 

" But as he grows he gathers much, 
And learns the use of thou and me, 
And finds, I am not what I see, 
And other than the things I touch." 

How shall we think of matter, the reality first dis- (1) what 
covered by mind.? Ordinarily we do think of it in ^^ Matter? 



I04 The Philosophy of Education 

two ways, viz., as inorganic and organic. Organic 
matter is such an assemblage of parts that each part 
is essential to the life of every other part. In an 
organism, like a plant or an animal, each part is both 
means and end. Inorganic matter, like a rock or a 
mountain, is an aggregate rather than a unity. 

But our question was intended to go deeper than 
our ordinary thought about the nature of the matter. 
This takes us at once out of the field of experience 
into that of speculation, where our present purpose 
does not permit us to tarry long. The last words of 
physics, the typical science of inorganic matter, con- 
cerning the ultimate nature of matter are atoms in 
motion ; or ions, infinitesimal divisions of the atom ; or 
electrons, infinitesimal electrified bodies ; or centres of 
force. The last words of biology, the typical science of 
organic matter, are life, the correspondence of internal 
to external, and primordial protoplasm. In these last 
words of the typical physical and natural sciences, they 
have already become philosophy, and it is fitting to hear 
what philosophy itself may say. Here the last words 
are, crude indefinite and unorganized stuff (Plato), an 
unknown thing-in-itself (Kant and Herbert Spencer), 
the not-self (Fichte), and the infinite idea self -objecti- 
fied (Hegel). Without definition of these positions, 
which would take us too far afield, it is clear to say 
that matter provides the mind with sensations, which 
mind alone without the medium of matter of some 
kind does not seem capable of doing ; also that matter 
is external to mind ; also that matter is, to a degree at 
least, intelligible to mind. For us an object is a unity 
of sensations that will go together, and beyond this 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 105 

our knowledge does not carry us. It is gratuitous to 
assume that, if the object were completely known, 
something entirely different would be discovered there 
from that which is already known concerning it. 
Combining these conceptions into a single' one, we 
may say that matter is the extra mentem object of 
thought, making sensations possible. This is what 
we finally know about the reality of material environ- 
ment, which is also a portion of the spiritual environ- 
ment in relation to which man stands. Nothing that 
we know about matter forbids us to believe, and every- 
thing that we know supports the belief, that mind is 
the ultimate reality of the universe. So far as mat- 
ter alone, then, is concerned in the question of one's 
metaphysical point of view, our present position is 
rightly described as idealism, and this is our gen- 
eral answer to the metaphysical problems previously 
shelved concerning the relations of consciousness to 
the brain and mind to matter. The little that we 
already know about matter as mind **in its otherness" 
or objectified form shows us how meagre are the 
confines of human knowledge after centuries of intel- 
lectual effort to comprehend, and what a useful dis- 
position could be made of measureless time in the 
extension of knowledge, should it be vouchsafed us. 

The discovery of the self follows upon the discovery (2) what 
of the not-self. Knowledge is first of matter, then of ^^ ^'^^'^ 
mind. Matter reduces itself in the last analysis to a 
sensation-producing extra-mental object of thought. 
What is the nature of the mind that first discovers 
matter and then itself } It was mind that we used in 
discovering and defining matter. Mind, then, is our 



io6 The Philosophy of Education 

instrument of discovery and definition. Mind it is 
wherewith definitions are sought and framed. It is 
our view-point of our world. The eye of the mind, 
after looking outward at the material world, may look 
inward at itself, as when a man in a mirror sees him- 
self seeing himself. Through this inward looking of 
the mind's eye, commonly called introspection, mind 
is immediately aware of itself. What is itself ? The 
mind reveals its nature in its processes and its prod- 
ucts. The difficulty in defining mind is mainly due 
to considering it abstractly, apart from its manifesta- 
tions. The attempt at such a definition can end only 
in synonyms, like consciousness, the state of being 
aware, intelligence, etc. Mind is the unity of its 
appearances. It is no thing-in-itself, lying back of the 
phenomena of consciousness, unknown and unknow- 
able. It is the synthesis of those concrete experi- 
ences known to all as sensation, perception, memory, 
thought, feeling, will, and the rest. Mind is not one 
of its own aspects ; it is the real unity of all conscious 
experience. Consciousness is never just consciousness 
but is always ^something. To define consciousness 
as such, and without any content in terms of its syno- 
nyms, is an intelligible but unserviceable procedure. 
Such consciousness is only the abstract possibility of 
those concrete mental experiences that occupy our 
waking lives. To understand the nature of mind, it 
must be found concretely, in its processes and prod- 
ucts, that is, in the mental sciences. What are the 
sciences of matter and mind .? 

The attempt of the human mind to know the inor- 
ganic phase of its material environment has taken 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 107 

shape, first, in physics, the science of inorganic (3) The 
matter, of its laws and properties, and of the forces ^'^^^f J?" 
acting upon it, and, as Bacon called it, " the mother of Sciences, 
sciences." Then follow, in succession, geology, the 
science of the earth's form and structure ; mineralogy, 
the science of certain naturally formed chemical sub- 
stances of definite constitution and usually crystalline 
form, called minerals ; geography, the science of the 
surface of the globe, its features, products, and peoples ; 
physiography, the science of the globe's climate, 
moisture, and atmospheric and oceanic currents ; 
chemistry, the science of the changes in the compo- 
sition of molecules of matter ; and astronomy, the 
science of the heavenly bodies. 

Man's knowledge of the organic world has taken 
form in biology, the science of plant and animal life, 
the type and head of the organic sciences, dividing 
itself into botany, the science of plants, and zoology, 
the science of animals. Then follow physiology, 
the science of the functions of the organs of the body 
of plants and animals ; anatomy, the science of the 
structure of the organs of the animal body ; anthro- 
pology, the science of man comprehensively viewed, 
and particularly in his primitive state ; ethnology, 
the science of the races of mankind ; sociology, the 
science of the constitution, phenomena, and develop- 
ment of human society ; and economics, the science 
of the laws of the production and distribution of the 
wealth of nations. The term organic, as describing 
these sciences, here includes not simply individuals, 
but also groups of individuals acting in organized 
masses; and economics, whose classification on any 



io8 The Philosophy of Education 

basis is not easy, is placed here as the science of one 
of society's products, viz., wealth. 

The attempt of the human mind to know itself 
takes two forms, viz., the mind may know itself as 
such, its own processes and their explanation ; and it 
may know itself in its products and their nature. The 
processes of mind would be sensation, perception, 
memory, attention, reasoning, and the like ; the prod- 
ucts of mind would be philosophy, language, mathe- 
matics, and the like. The former division is the 
science of mind as subjective ; the latter the science 
of mind as objective. 

The typical science of mind as subjective is psy- 
chology, the description and explanation of states of 
consciousness as such. The description of a state of 
consciousness, such as attention, memory, perception, 
etc., is its analysis into its constituent elements. The 
explanation of a state of consciousness is its corre- 
sponding brain state. Wherever mind is, there is psy- 
chology's opportunity. So there is a psychology of 
the animal, the child, the adult, society, the races of 
mankind, and of mind in its abnormal conditions 
of insanity, hypnotism, etc. The mind gets knowl- 
edge of itself as such through introspection alone and 
through experiment and observation interpreted by 
means of introspection. Introspection is self-observa- 
tion ; experiment is the approach to the mind through 
apparatus ; observation reaches the mind of others 
through its physical manifestations. 

The sciences of mind as objective are logic, meta- 
physics, aesthetics, ethics, language, and mathe- 
matics. All these are the objectified products of the 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 109 

human intelligence. Logic is the science of thought 
as an objective reality. Metaphysics is the science 
of ultimate principles. ^Esthetics is the science 
of the sense of beauty, Ethics the science of human 
conduct. Logic, aesthetics, and ethics are the ob- 
jective mental sciences corresponding to the three 
subjective mental powers of knowing, feeling, and 
willing, and deal respectively with Truth, Beauty, and 
Goodness, as objective ideals. The history of phi- 
losophy is the written record of what men have thought 
on mental and speculative problems. 

The expression of thought in words is language and 
the science of language is grammar. A new lan- 
guage learned is a new expression of thought, a new 
weapon with which to think. Language is the door 
to literature, which is one of the expressions of the 
emotions, and will have its place later in the discus- 
sion of the emotional environment of man. The 
usual divisions of the science of language include 
reading, writing, analyzing, the study of foreign lan- 
guages, all ending in the master language science of 
comparative philology. 

Finally, of the objective mental sciences, there is 
mathematics, the science of what the mind has pro- 
duced in the realm of number, of measurement, and 
of quality. As soon as any other science becomes 
capable of being strictly measured or of statement in 
numerical terms, it begins to use mathematics. The 
exactness that characterizes this science is due to its 
being the mind's own objective product. The usual 
divisions of mathematics, showing the mind's progres- 
sive comprehension of quantity, are arithmetic, the 



and Arts. 



no The Philosophy of Education 

science of number ; algebra, the science of symbol ; 
geometry, the science of form ; trigonometry, the 
science of angles ; analytic geometry, the application 
of algebra to geometry ; and calculus, the science of 
the ratios of numbers. 
(4) Sciences This enumeration concludes the list of the main 
sciences, material and mental, that compose the intel- 
lectual element of the spiritual environment of man. 
As sciences they are all theoretical. But in our world 
theory and practice, truth and life, are so interwoven 
that many of the sciences have corresponding arts. 
Theory, after all, is but practice comprehended, and 
practice is but theory applied. Truth is life under- 
stood and life is truth embodied. Using Professor 
Jevons's noted distinction, a science teaches us to 
know; an art to do. In science, scimus ut sciamus ; 
in art, scimus ut prodticamus. In science we possess 
systematized knowledge ; in art we use knowledge. 
In addition to meaning the use of knowledge for any 
end, as the art of war, the art of navigation, etc., the 
term art has two other common uses, viz., the use 
of knowledge in producing the beautiful, as painting, 
sculpture, etc., in which sense alone art is its own 
excuse for being ; and also the term includes the prod- 
ucts of both the aesthetic and the volitional powers 
of mind, as in the common phrase, '' Faculty of Arts 
and Sciences," and in the designation of the degree 
of " Bachelor of Arts," excluding thereby historically 
only the sciences, for which it is customary to use a 
different scholastic degree. 

To illustrate the application of the theoretic sciences 
to the practical arts, reference may be made to the 



The Sociological Aspect of Education iii 

following sciences and their corresponding arts, viz., 
physics, and mechanical engineering ; geology and 
mineralogy, and mining and metallurgy ; physiography 
and meteorology, and the weather bureau ; chemis- 
try, and industrial chemistry ; astronomy and geog- 
raphy, and navigation and travel ; physiology and 
anatomy, and medicine; anthropology, ethnology, 
sociology, economics, and the settlement of social 
questions ; physiology, psychology, the social sciences, 
and teaching ; logic, and thinking ; ethics, and con- 
duct ; grammar, and speaking and writing ; mathe- 
matics, and civil engineering. These sciences with 
their corresponding arts indicate how knowledge is 
first for its own sake and then for life's sake. 

The question is sometimes asked as to the chrono- 
logical priority of arts and sciences. It is practically 
the invariable rule that first we do and then reflect 
upon and understand what we did. First language, 
then grammar ; first morals, then ethics ; first think- 
ing, then logic ; first medicine, then physiology ; and 
so on. The course of human progress in the arts and 
sciences seems first to have been a weak and empiri- 
cal kind of art ; then the science of this art painfully 
worked out ; then, finally, rapidest progress in putting 
the art on a scientific basis. First crude navigation 
hugging the shore ; then astronomy and geography 
and the mariner's compass ; then, finally, the naviga- 
tion of the deep seas. First teaching ; then physiol- 
ogy, psychology, and the social sciences ; then teach- 
ing as an applied science. Teaching to-day is passing 
from the empirical, the experimental, the customary, 
to the rational and the scientific as its basis. A noted 



112 The Philosophy of Education 

case where it is still uncertain whether practice pre- 
ceded theory is in the ritual-myth controversy, though 
analogy would go to indicate that the myth is an 
attempt to explain the ritual. 

The progress of the sciences themselves, apart from 
their relation to the arts, has been from the empi- 
ristic to the rational, as from the alchemist to the 
chemist, from the astrologer to the astronomer, and 
from the medicine-man to the physician, 
(s) The The child born into the world helpless and ignorant 

Educational jg encompasscd by this knowledge preserved in books, 
Science. which the race to which he belongs has wrested from 
the bosom of nature and the heart of man. He begins 
life an alien and a stranger to this science. His edu- 
cation, though reproducing in his own mind some- 
thing of what the race has discovered and known, 
adjusts him to this intellectual element in his envi- 
ronment, puts him at ease in his intellectual world, 
so far forth socializing him and making him ready for 
living in human touch with Nature and Man. No 
student in the educational period fixed by his own 
development can attain the universal knowledge which 
the race has discovered, nor is this necessary for 
educational purposes. Sufficient is it for him to 
know enough concerning the essential facts of men 
and things to live in comprehension of his world, to 
get the message of courage in investigation that 
comes from the scientific achievements of the race, to 
appreciate the unity of human knowledge, to know 
enough truth to free the intelligence from the bond- 
age of superstition and fear, and to be open in expec- 
tant waiting to all truth. These are the worthy 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 113 

lessons of science, which needs to-day to add to its 
virtues yet another, viz., to become conscious of its 
long, toilsome history, that more of reverence may 
grow with the increase of knowledge. 

Apart from these general considerations, there are 
certain specific consequences of scientific study in 
the way of training and culture that make it neces- 
sary for the education of the child to adjust him to 
his intellectual environment. Consider, first, the 
effects of the study of the sciences of matter. They 
develop the mental powers of observation, inference, 
and insight. Observation collects facts by the detec- 
tion of resemblances, and the discrimination of dif- 
ferences ; inference sees the consequences of facts ; 
and insight, their meaning. They test and train the 
mental powers of abstraction, of forming general con- 
cepts of a group, and of framing logical definitions 
with correct genus and dijferentia. They permit the 
gathering of knowledge at first hand, in the subtle 
pursuit of Nature's own secrets, and they require pre- 
cision, and accuracy, and clearness in results. They 
arouse and feed the spirit of acquisitiveness and com- 
municate practical knowledge. They give knowledge 
of Nature, leading surely to command of her powers, 
and perhaps to love of communion with her visible 
and audible forms. They give one respect for his 
own intellectual power, which is a part of that racial 
mind that has compassed the universe in its concep- 
tion, though not in final comprehension ; and they 
lead to a vision of the unity of the material world. 
They disclose the suggestion of intelligence in matter, 
allow the recognition of the character of Nature as 
I 



114 The Philosophy of Education 

finally phenomenal, and the character of the immanent 
Mind, without which Nature would be unintelligible, 
as finally noumenal and the ultimate reality. And 
last, since matter first of all things presents itself to 
the child's and man's awakened mind, the acquaint- 
anceship with it through the material sciences, both 
inorganic (otherwise called physical) and organic 
(otherwise called natural), is the basis of other and 
later things to come. 

After matter, mind. Why should the child be 
adjusted in his educational period to the mental 
sciences, both objective and subjective.'* To know 
himself, the microcosm reflecting the nature of the 
macrocosm, as in the subjective mental science of 
psychology. To learn how he ought to think, and 
so, perchance, to think more truly, as in the objec- 
tive mental science of logic. To learn what the 
lovers of wisdom of all times have thought concern- 
ing truth, and so to be guided in his own thinking, 
as in the history of philosophy. To discover what 
answers can be given by the human mind to its own 
ultimate inquiries, which by its nature it cannot but 
raise, and yet not completely solve, as in metaphysics, 
the queen of mental sciences. To understand the 
nature of the beautiful and the ugly, and so, perhaps, 
to enjoy the one and remove the other, as in aes- 
thetics. To understand the nature of righteousness 
and sin, and so, haply, to cling to the one and despise 
the other. And finally, to comprehend the expres- 
sion of thought in language, and so, possibly, to 
become efficient in the communication of thought in 
speech and in writing. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 115 

In each case the mental result of the pursuit of 
these sciences is certain, the practical result uncer- 
tain, but desirable. This is because to do is not so 
easy as to see what 'twere good to do. As Shake- 
speare makes the learned Portia say : — 

" If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, 
chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' 
palaces." 

Doing is not so easy as seeing what ought to be 
done> because perceiving the truth is easier than 
the more energetic act of willing the truth. The 
failure to draw this distinction led the wise Socrates 
to slip in his famous dictum that knowledge is virtue, 
to whom it did not seem possible that a man should 
know what was best for him and yet not do it. Knowl- 
edge is indeed a means to virtue, but it is possible 
for a man to see the light and turn from it and walk 
in darkness. The theoretic comprehension of truth 
solicits, but does not compel, obedience. 

But we left unsaid our word about mathematics, 
as the last in the list of the objective mental sci- 
ences. Like psychology, mathematics is a descrip- 
tive science, and not normative, as logic and ethics. 
In mathematics there is no distinction between the 
is and the ought. The comprehension of the theory 
of mathematics entails necessarily the practical con- 
sequences that are desirable, for these practical conse- 
quences are here primarily training and not conduct. 
Apart from its manifold applications, mathematics is 
the inevitable disciplinary element in the curriculum. 
It trains in the habits of logical and symbolic think- 
ing, of precision and concentration, and it develops 



ii6 The Philosophy of Education 

the imagination. Its logic is particularly of the de- 
ductive rather than the inductive type, for its argu- 
ments are from axioms and principles rather than 
from collected facts. Algebra and equations repre- 
senting curves use symbolic thinking. The precision 
of mathematics is due, as previously noted, to the 
fact that the mind is here dealing with its own 
achievements in the field of quantity. The habit 
of concentration is developed in following through 
a series of equations in a single problem. And the 
use of the imagination is required in descriptive 
geometry, and in conceiving the non-Euclidian space. 
In the words of a recent writer, M. Berthelot : — 

" Mathematics gives one a clear idea of demonstra- 
tion and accustoms him to form long trains of thought 
and reasoning methodically connected and sustained 
by the final certainty of the result ; and it has the 
further advantage, from a purely moral point of view, 
of inspiring an absolute and fanatical respect for 
truth. In addition to all this, mathematics, and 
chiefly algebra and infinitesimal calculus, excite to a 
high degree the conception of the signs and symbols 
— necessary instruments to extend the power and 
reach of the human mind by summarizing. Mathe- 
matics is the indispensable instrument of all physi- 
cal research." 1 

The educational value of science guarantees it a 
permanent place in the school curriculum. The prob- 
lem is to adjust its rights with those of art and the 
volitions. 

1 *' Science as an Instrument of Education," Popular Sciencf 
Monthly, Vol. 51, pp. 253 ff. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 117 

This concludes our discussion of the nature of the 
first of the three elements of the spiritual environ- 
ment of the child to which his education must relate 
him, viz., the intellectual; and it remains to consider 
similarly the emotional and the volitional. 

Under this treatment of the emotional element of The Nature 
the spiritual environment which must become a part ^/^^l eT^" 
of the life of the child will be included the highest ronment. 
products of the emotions of man, viz.. Art and Reli- 
gion. The constituent of the child's environment 
which we call emotional is what man has felt and 
its modes of expression. It is what we call Beauty, 
as the intellectual element is what we call Truth. 
Man feels, when feeling has reached its truest object, 
the beautiful, and the expression of the beautiful in 
permanent form is Art. 

What is the beautiful.'* Subjectively, it appeals to The Nature 
the sense of the perfect in the mind. Objectively, it ° ^^^^* 
is the harmonious, the symmetrical, especially as this 
quality appears in the unifying of diverse elements. 
The crude stuff of the world has been called, since 
the days of the Greeks, matter. When matter be- 
gins to embody an idea in harmonious form, it begins 
to be beautiful. 

Art, as the expression of the beautiful, is the union 
of the material and the spiritual, the union of matter 
and mind, the union of the real and the ideal. When 
matter begins to show forth the work of mind and 
when mind begins to manifest itself in matter, then 
is Art the result. Matter becomes in Art the perma- 
nent expression of some human idea, or feeling, or 
action, or any union of these. Without mind, matter 



ii8 The Philosophy of Education 

is only the possibility of Art. All Art is a kind of 
autobiography. " You cannot produce Art without a 
man," said Wagner. The Romans first said that the 
principle of Art is unity in variety, the unity of idea 
in a variously wrought-out piece, and Coleridge re- 
affirms this ancient insight. 

The artist is the executor of the idea in material 
form. Following an inward impulse to create, which 
men formerly called the divimis afflatus and to-day 
call genius, he lays hold of that material form in 
which he can best express himself, masters its 
technique, and produces art. The grade of work, 
from the ugly to the perfect, depends upon the genius 
of the artist and his technique, which is his mastery 
of the matter chosen as his medium of self-expres- 
sion. Plato conceived of the whole world as a work 
of art, fashioned out of chaos by the demiurgos, the 
divine worker for the people. But matter was diffi- 
cult to form, and so arose the ugly. 
The Arts. In how many pleasing and permanent material 

forms may the life and mind of man take shape } 
What is the number of the arts } There are five 
separate arts, viz., architecture, sculpture, painting, 
music, and literature. Other modes of artistic ex- 
pression are accessories of these. Drawing, land- 
scape gardening, and engraving go with painting ; 
dancing, the poetry of motion, and vocal music go 
with music ; elocution, the histrionic art, and oratory 
go with literature. 

A few brief words of description and interpretation 
of each of the arts will serve to define more pre- 
cisely the nature of the aesthetic environment and 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 119 

its mission in the education of man. Architecture 
is the art of building. In it the sensuous material 
is in excess, adumbrating, not clearly revealing, the 
ideal. Suggestions of the ideal appear in the con- 
trast of light and shade, in the color, in the variety 
and the relationship of the lines one to another, in 
the strength and fitness of the whole, in the har- 
mony and proportion of the masses, and especially 
in the poised conflict between the down-pressing 
weight of the heavy portions and the upholding 
strength of the supporting pillars. Architecture is 
the one case where beauty is not its own excuse 
for being, for buildings are primarily for use. The 
ornament is for the building, not the building for the 
ornament. The building both protects and serves. 
Not all buildings are beautiful, though all are use- 
ful. It is the function of architecture to combine 
the useful and the ornamental in the buildings of 
men, be they devoted to religious, state, social, or 
transportation purposes. 

Sculpture is the art of carving, cutting, hewing, 
wood, stone, or metals into statues or ornaments. It 
is the permanent embodiment of an animate form, 
human, animal, or plant, and showing, in the case of 
the human or animal form, muscular development 
and attitude. Sculpture is a higher step toward 
ideality than architecture, being less subject to the 
domination of matter. 

Painting is the art of representing objects in color 
on a flat surface, hence from a single point of view. 
The painter, like the sculptor, puts the life of his 
soul into his work, even if it be some material ob- 



I20 The Philosophy of Education 

ject, and the work is beautiful in so far as it ex- 
presses the soul of the painter. The elimination of 
the third dimension of space in painting abstracts 
from materiality, which in consequence is yet more 
ideal, — the mind having to supply more to realize 
the scene than in sculpture. 

The three arts now considered appeal to the eye 
and occupy space, are visual and spatial. The next 
art in the list of five appeals to the ear and occupies 
time, is auditory and temporal. 

Music is the art of tones. A tone stands in con- 
trast with a noise, both being sounds. A tone is 
due to periodic, a noise to non-periodic, air vibra- 
tions. Time is the condition of music, and thus 
every trace of the three dimensions of space is 
suppressed. This fact accounts for the untram- 
melled character of the mind's production in music 
and for the high ideality of this art. The con- 
tent of music is man's inmost emotional nature. 
The emotions of man in the presence of the facts 
of nature or the experiences of human life find 
voice in music. With its unutterable and indefin- 
able message from the soul to the soul of man, music 
summons us away from the known hard world of 
reality to the unknown, invisible, and perfect world 
of ideals, where things are as we want them to be. 
It is an ecstacy of feeling, not a clear vision. Music 
cannot tell a story ; it expresses emotions. Chopin's 
''Funeral March" means different things to differ- 
ent listeners, but the emotions of all are thrilled. 
Music cannot paint a picture. When the same piece 
of music suggests the same picture to different 



/ 

The Sociological Aspect of Education 121 

minds, it is because of the associations of colors, 
ideas, etc., that the tones have, not because the com- 
poser has the picture in mind to represent. True, 
in a freakish spirit, Wagner can imitate natural 
sounds in his music ; but his great underlying theme 
is a lonely soul longing for congenial companion- 
ship, which is the story of his own life. Thus, music 
is a call to an experience, not to ideas, and is hence 
the most subjective of the arts. The attempt to fit 
music to words is like the attempt to define a feel- 
ing, is artificial, and not within the true province of 
music. 

Literature is the art of letters. It has been de- 
fined as ''the written record of valuable thought, 
having other than merely practical purpose." ^ It 
aims primarily, not to convey positive knowledge, but 
to enthuse, to inspire, through fineness of thought 
and beauty of style. Originally it appealed to the 
ear, and when in its poetic form still depends on 
time, and not on space. Poetry is the rhythmical, 
and sometimes the rhymed, expression in language 
of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Literature, 
whether in its poetic or prose form, is always fine 
thought fittingly clothed. The poetic form of Htera- 
ture is itself of three kinds, epic, lyric, and dramatic. 
The epic is racial, like Homer and Beowulf ; the lyric 
is individual, like Wordsworth's nature poems, or 
Shakespeare's sonnets ; the drama is social, and may 
be either comic or tragic. In comedy the individual 
is pitted against society and overthrown, but not to 
his own undoing, as Falstaff in the Henry plays. In 

1 Richardson, " American Literature," p. i. 



122 The Philosophy of Education 

tragedy the individual is seriously overthrown by 
society, as Antigone or King Richard. Tragedy 
is the conquest of society over the individual that 
attacks it. Without this social conflict there is no 
dramatic situation. In tragedy and in the more seri- 
ous prose works, literature is closely akin to philoso- 
phy. Literature is the lasting expression of the 
meaning of life more or less intuitively reached. 
Philosophy is the systematic expression of the mean- 
ing of life more or less rationally reached. The truth 
of literature is philosophy ; the garment of philoso- 
phy, when it is well clothed, is literature. As a prod- 
uct of society literature requires genius, leisure, and 
experience. America has the genius latent, but it is 
too youthful, and, as a part of its youth, is still too 
devoted to material pursuits, to establishing the basis 
of its civilization, to have produced yet a name to 
rank with the world's five greatest in five ages born, 
viz.. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. 
Poe is our widest known name, though Longfellow 
is doubtless our laureate. 

Reviewing the arts as constituting the emotional 
environment of man, it is to be remembered that their 
common principle is that variety in unity announced 
by the Romans, repeated by Coleridge, and expressed 
by Wordsworth as " a multiplicity of symmetrical 
parts uniting in a consistent whole " ; also that their 
origin is due to the play impulse as previously shown, 
and as expressed in the saying of William Morris 
that "Art is the expression of man's pleasure in his 
work;" and also that underlying all these arts of the 
beautiful is aesthetics, the science of the beautiful. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 123 

The development that the aesthetic element in life is 
likely to make will be through the production in an 
aesthetic way of the commonest things, the decora- 
tion of the useful. 

At the beginning of the discussion of the emotional The Nature 
element in the spiritual environment, rehgion also ^^^^^^s^o^- 
was mentioned as one of the highest products of the 
emotions of man, and so as highly constitutive of the 
environment into the full appreciation of which 
the child must come. Religion and art spring from 
the same fount of the personal being, viz., the feel- 
ings. Art is the expression of the feelings in the 
presence of the beautiful or sublime ; religion is the 
expression of the feelings in the presence of the divine. 
When the divine is considered perfect and beautiful, 
as well as true and good, then religion and art have 
in part identical elements. The fundamental feeling 
in the presence of the divine, the Ideal Person, is, as 
Schleiermacher says, the sense of dependence. Reli- 
gion is not primarily what a man thinks ; this is dogma, 
creed, or philosophy. Nor is religion primarily what 
a man does, for the deeds of man may be done under 
necessity or from motives of prudence or convention. 
But religion is primarily what the man is, what he 
feels, in the presence of the Supreme Person, and 
then, and then, what he thinks and does in consequence 
of such feeling. The translation of the feelings in- 
spired by the presence of divinity into thought is 
theology, the science of religion, and into volition is 
the daily deed and ceremonial usage that constitute 
the practice of religion. The infinite, which can be 
thought but not imaged, is opened to the youthful 



124 The Philosophy of Education 

mind in religion — the infinite in time, which is eter- 
nity ; in knowledge, which is omniscience ; in power, 
which is omnipotence ; in goodness, which is holiness ; 
and in love, which is the Divine Passion, revealing 
the unity, the at-one-ment, of the human and divine 
in suffering. Religion is the broadest thing in the 
world, and its effects upon the growing mind ought 
likewise to be the most broadening of influences. 
Unfortunately the best educational service of religion 
is narrowed from insistence on the human unessen- 
tials instead of the divine essentials. 

The absence of anything like religious instruction 
in our public schools must be considered as inevitable 
under our form of government, which provides for 
the separation of church and state, and at the same 
time for the public education of all youth. To put 
religion into the curriculum of the public school would 
contradict the principle of the separation of church 
and state. To say that the public school ought not 
to exist if it does not teach religion, is to contradict 
the principle upon which our national system of public 
education is founded. Experience has indicated the 
wisdom both of the separation of church and state and 
of the existence of the public school system. Thus 
the logical result of our form of government is that 
religion be not taught in public schools. This result 
is also desirable, in the interest both of religion and 
democracy. Religion cannot be taught. To attempt 
to teach religion is to reduce it to theology, as the 
attempt to teach morality is to reduce it to ethics. 
The democracy would also suffer by the attempt to 
teach religion in the public schools, in that certain 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 125 

elements in society would at once withdraw their 
support from a government no longer religiously free. 
To-day the public school is the great preserver of that 
homogeneity in society necessary to a democracy. 
It would cease to be so the moment it began to teach 
religion. The public school itself, finally, would 
suffer loss of influence the moment it ceased to serve 
the best interests of the democracy. 

Yet it remains true that religion is the most im- 
portant element in the Hfe of man, and consequently 
the most important factor in that spiritual environ- 
ment to which the education of the child must adjust 
him. Fortunately for the interests of reUgion, the 
democracy, and the public school, religion is a life, 
not a system ; is a natural expression of human nature, 
and not an artificial graft upon it; is a growth of 
the pupil's nature, not an acquisition of his intellect. 
This being true, reUgion can be developed, if not 
taught. As the reHgion of the life of the teacher 
touches the germs of religion in the life of the pupil, 
they spring into activity and growth, like seed in the 
soil under the quickening touch of sun and rain. 
ReUgion as theology is excluded from the public 
schools only to make way for religion as life. If 
teachers are religious, pupils do not need to be taught 
religion. This is not to minimize the importance of 
the teaching of reHgion as a system of truths in the 
home and the church, — there must be truth as well 
as life, — but only to indicate the relation of religion 
to the pubHc schools. 

The subject of religion in the public schools is 
essentially related to the problem of the nature and 



126 The Philosophy of Education 

extent of the possible use of the Bible in the public 
schools. A few things are clear. A fairly familiar 
knowledge of the Bible is essential to that broad cul- 
ture of man which it is the function of education to 
give. The Bible provides models of high grade of 
practically all the leading forms of literature. It in- 
terprets life in terms of the loftiest ideas possible for 
man to conceive. It announces principles of highest 
ethical and religious value for the conduct of man. 
Because of these things it is necessary that in some 
way the life of growing youth incorporate the life of 
the Bible. But it is another question whether it is the 
function of the public school to render this service. 
This latter question to-day is essentially a legal one, 
however infrequently this fact is recognized. As 
such, it is wholly subject to the power of public opinion. 
Public opinion to-day is strong, but not unanimous, in 
supporting the reading of the Bible, without comment, 
as part of a simple devotional morning exercise, con- 
sisting also of singing and prayer. This quiet uplift 
of the school interests into the eternal world, as a 
voluntary exercise, effacing human distinctions and 
uniting human hearts in a divine life, will not lightly 
be surrendered by a nation whose officials are inducted 
into office with an oath by the Scriptures and that 
stamps upon its coinage its trust in God. To go 
farther than this and ask that the Bible be used as a 
text in morals or even in literature would be good for 
morals and literature, no doubt, but not for religion, 
whose interest it is the prime function of the Bible 
to serve. The teaching under any guise in the public 
school of the book upon which all the religious sects 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 127 

are founded would end unavoidably in involving sec- 
tarian interpretations. It would also tend to reduce 
to the level of an ordinary text-book that volume of 
the Christian religion whose sacredness is regularly 
held to be essential. The Bible can retain its present 
place in the public school, not as a book to be taught, 
but only as its own spokesman to the spiritual life. 
For the necessary work of instruction in the Bible 
the public school must leave to the derelict American 
home and the Christian church their duties to 
perform. 

With the substitution of the spirit of the religious 
life for the letter of religious instruction in the 
American public school system in contrast with 
foreign systems, our teachers have both their greater 
opportunity and their weightier responsibility. Not 
theirs to keep religion from being odious through 
compulsory instruction, but to make it attractive 
through contagious example ; not theirs to keep alive 
the spirit when the letter killeth, but to show forth 
the spirit when the letter is absent ; not theirs to in- 
struct the intellect with religious truth, but to quicken 
the heart with religious life ; not theirs to be priests 
of a particular religious institution, but prophets of 
the universal religious nature. 

Why should the child in the schools be adjusted The Educa- 
te the aesthetic element of his environment ? With- of°Art.^^^''^ 
out doubt it is the most neglected feature in our cur- 
riculum, and yet it stands as an essential constituent 
of the child's present and future environment and is 
the product of one of the deepest phases of the hu- 
man consciousness. The sense of the beautiful is 



128 The Philosophy of Education 

the finest pleasure the human mind can enjoy, calling 
into play all the powers of mind working in harmony. 
The beautiful object itself is harmonious and perfect, 
and, in enjoying it, one identifies himself with it, be- 
comes the thing he enjoys for the time being. Rev- 
erence for the beautiful is an uplifting force in the 
individual life. Beauty reminds morality that perfec- 
tion is possible, and the holiness of beauty enhances 
the beauty of holiness. An aesthetic appreciation of 
the beautiful makes the imperfect and the ugly more 
dissatisfying and repellent, and so tends to remove it 
from existence. This is the practical outcome of the 
love of the beautiful. Its selection means the death, 
by atrophy, of the ugly. The doctrine of the beauti- 
ful shows that life need not be exclusive to be worthy, 
but may be abundantly inclusive. The Puritan ideal 
of goodness needs to be supplemented by the Grecian 
ideal of beauty. The life of the Middle Ages was 
richer because there was the cathedral builder as well 
as the monk. That which is ultimately beautiful is 
also good. The feeling of this truth is needed to 
bring up into just emphasis the aesthetic studies of 
the schools. Pupils in the schools who know their 
science and their history could not purchase a good 
picture and would not spiritually miss from the room 
a piece of art. The failure to possess this apprecia- 
tion of art is arrested development, is individual de- 
fect, is inability to come fully into the life of the race, 
and so to universalize one's own life. In so far forth 
education fails of its end, viz., the complete socializa- 
tion of the individual life. 

Literature, in particular, widens the individual 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 129 

experience by presenting typical and universal human 
characters, making our acquaintanceship world-wide, 
which otherwise would be limited, as Tennyson says, 
to ''the rustic murmur of our burg." For jealousy, 
ambition, a sister's devotion, the hard schoolmaster, 
in typical forms, we go, not to life, but to literature. 
These ideal, that is, mentally constructed, personages 
suffer, and we are instructed by their sufferings. As 
Aristotle showed, we pity their ends, and fear similar 
things for ourselves. Thus are we purified and 
taught. In literature we see mirrored our possible 
selves, and so progress in that self-knowledge which 
the wise commend. This learning from the lives of 
literary creations. Commissioner Harris aptly names 
the vicarious element in literature. 

The effect of the omission of the aesthetic element 
in life is so well portrayed and deplored by Darwin in 
his autobiography that perhaps the quoting of the 
familiar passage is pardonable. He writes : *' Up to 
the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds 
gave me great pleasure ; and even as a schoolboy 
I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in 
the historical plays. I have also said that pictures 
formerly gave me considerable, and music very great, 
delight. But now for many years I cannot endure 
to read a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read 
Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it 
nauseated me. I have also lost my taste for pictures 

and music If I had to live my life again, I 

would have made a rule to read some poetry and 
listen to some music at least every week ; for per- 
haps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus 



ijo The Philosophy of Education 



The Nature 
of the Voli- 
tional Envi- 
ronment. 



have been kept alive through use. The loss of these 
tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be 
injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the 
moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of 
our nature." 

After these words from the most eminent of mod- 
ern scientists little need be said in support of the 
growing tendency in American schools to have build- 
ings of admirable architecture, to place statuary and 
paintings in the school room, to have music in the 
exercises, to make the grammar secondary to the 
literature, to teach the elements of color and form, to 
beautify the landscape and practise the presence of 
the aesthetic with school gardens. 

After the intellectual and the emotional comes the 
volitional element of the social, which is the spiritual, 
environment. The race has been thoughtful, compre- 
hending, and busy interpreting its world ; hence arose 
the intellectual environment into which the child is 
born. The race has been sensitive, appreciative, and 
affected by its world ; hence arose the emotional 
environment of the child. And the race has been 
active, original, and energetic in moulding the circum- 
stances into which it was naturally cast ; hence arises 
the volitional element of the spiritual environment. 
Having to do with the will, being in fact the product 
of the will, it is sometimes technically called the prac- 
tical environment. It is the last element to which 
the child must be adjusted in his educational period. 

What is the volitional environment ? It is what 
man has achieved, and the record of such achieve- 
ment. It is the monument of the will of man. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 131 

There are three ways in which the will of man may 
act, viz., as an individual, as society, and as a nation. 
Society is individuals organized, and a nation is a 
compact society. The social and national wills are 
not entities in themselves, but represent the consensus 
of opinion of the majority of the individual wills, or is 
supposed so to do. In so far as an individual acts, 
we have morality ; in so far as society acts, we have 
laws ; in so far as a nation acts, we have constitu- 
tions ; and in so far as records of these actions are 
preserved, we have history. Thus there are four 
members of the volitional environment, viz., history, TheVoii- 
constitutions, law, and morals. Each of these must *^°^^* 
have its word in further definition of the volitional 
environment. 

I. What is history.? Herodotus, the father of The Nature 
history, says it is investigation, and what is learned ^^^^^tory. 
thereby ; hence its Greek name, laropia. This con- 
ception is still present in our thought of history. But 
what is learned ? 

Emerson and Carlyle say, the lives and influence of 
great men. History is biography. But the great man 
needs armies of soldiers, navies of sailors, hosts of 
followers, and a people, to be effective on an histori- 
cal scale. Napoleon without the Old Guard is an 
exile. 

Thus many have been led to say that history is 
past politics. Most of the historians before J. R. 
Green were of this type. In the narration of past 
politics it is a subtle temptation to the historian to let 
his own prejudices color his view. Like a pane of 
glass through which one looks, itself unseen, or like a 



132 The Philosophy of Education 

telescopic lens, bringing distant objects near but not 
distorting them, so should be the historian. 

This position has given foundation to the school of 
history founded by Ranke, who modestly sinks his 
own personality behind the words : ** I will only re- 
late how it really was." History then becomes the 
unwritten record of the facts of human achievement, 
and it is perhaps most commonly so conceived. 
Many are those who say, however. Who will show us 
any veritable facts in history .? The difficulty of dis- 
covering precisely the nature of the past sometimes 
leads these questioners to adopt the sarcastic state- 
ment of the great Napoleon, who made his own 
precedents, and learned nothing from the facts of the 
past, viz., "History is fiction agreed upon." In 
the same vein it is sometimes heard that history is 
the record of what never happened, which saying 
can be passed over in the same light spirit in which it 
is uttered in favor of the conception that history is 
the record of human activity. 

Passing from the definition of history to its inter- 
pretation, which is an unwelcome task to the majority 
of historians, who find themselves more than occupied 
with the facts alone, but which is a natural inquiry to 
a synthetic and bottom-seeking mind, there are two 
contradictory theories, the one of Helwald and Buckle 
and that of Hegel. The former theory says that 
history is a necessity, and that the events of the past 
could not have happened otherwise than they did. 
History thus becomes "the dull rattling off of a chain 
forged innumerable ages ago." Nature knows no 
exceptions to its laws, this theory says, and human 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 133 

nature which is responsible for history is but another 
kind of nature. Consistency would seem to demand 
that man be denied the freedom in his deed that it 
is known nature does not possess. 

The objections to the view that history is necessity 
are three. First, if history were necessity historians 
ought to be able to predict the future, as astronomers 
predict eclipses, but they are not. The prediction of 
the number of thefts, suicides, murders, marriages, 
etc., of which so much is made by Buckle, are only 
approximately, not absolutely, true. Man is too inde- 
terminate in his action for these predictions ever to 
become exact, or for that knowledge of his choices 
conditioning these predictions to be attained. 

Second, if history were necessity, we ought to be 
able to explain the past without the will of man, as 
we explain the history of the development of the 
natural world ; but we cannot, since there is no one 
principle upon which all men act, either of selfishness 
or unselfishness. Besides, man changes with his en- 
vironment to some extent, and so can never become a 
constant factor to be depended on in action, as the 
distance and attraction of the moon. 

Third, if history were necessity, the zest of action 
would be groundless, since the outcome is inevitable, 
whether we strive or not. If we trust our own con- 
sciousness, we cannot help believing in freedom for 
ourselves, even when we deny it to others. If we deny 
the validity of consciousness in this particular, we have 
no ground left for trusting it in any particular. The 
freedom of man means that he makes history, and is 
not simply made by it. So far from being necessity. 



134 The Philosophy of Education 

history thus becomes a synthesis of the will relations 
of humanity.^ It is the volition of the race. 

Is history simply a chronicle of facts, even of willed 
facts ? Is it only a phenomenal affair with no mean- 
ing behind it ? Hegel has put meaning into history 
for us, and has elevated it from the plane of the em- 
pirical to the rational. To Hegel history is theophany, 
is the mode of manifestation of the mind of God in 
the life of man, is the dramatization of truth, — the 
enactment in the world, as on a stage, of the inward 
truth of things. It is the process whereby potential 
truth becomes actual truth, and is a revelation of the 
real nature of humanity. In this sense it is true that 
the will of the people may be the will of God. With- 
out the assumption of an immanent Mind, all things — 
Nature, man, and his history — are meaningless. With 
this assumption, all things are shot through with infi- 
nite meaning, and life is the process of its interpre- 
tation. The race is working out its salvation with 
fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in it 
both to will and to do of His good pleasure. To 
him who admits this deeper meaning in things than 
appears, history is indeed philosophy teaching by 
example. 

What is the truth of truths which the history of 
the race seems to reveal ? Such a question must be 
answered only by a wide induction, not by a priori 
speculation. As Hegel, with master intellect, has 
pointed out, history is a record of a certain kind of 
progress in self-consciousness, — an increasing reali- 

1 Cf. Munsterberg, " Psychology and Life," Essay, " Psychology and 
History." 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 135 

zation of man as a free being. In the East there 
are none free but one, — the despot, the sultan. In 
Greece some are free, but the most are not ; the 
thirty thousand Athenian citizens are free, but the 
hundred thousand slaves are not free. In the West, 
with the Anglo-Saxon race, arose the consciousness 
that all are free ; man as man is free. Freedom 
means dependence on self, independence, and not 
dependence on another. Freedom is not the absence 
of law, but conformity to righteous law. Freedom in 
society is not anarchy, — the absence of rule, — but 
is righteous self-rule. Freedom, whether individual 
or national, is the consciousness of one's self as the 
source of one's law. The realization of the idea of 
freedom is the movement of history, willed into being 
by the actors on the world stage. Freedom is the 
volition of the race concerning its own destiny. It 
is because the race has given its life for this benefi- 
cent idea that man is subtly attracted by this sacred 
word. The indwelling divinity that shapes the ends of 
human living appointed freedom, as it would appear, to 
be the goal of human progress, and history is essentially 
the record of the process whereby this freedom has 
been attained. This apocalyptic conception of his- 
tory is inconsistent with that theory of special Provi- 
dence which sees God in some events, but not in 
others, but is identical with that theory of general 
Providence which sees the whole upward progress of 
civilization as the will of God expressing itself through 
the will of man. 

The question is sometimes mooted as to whether is History 
history is a science. We have seen what history is. ^"^"^^^ «* 



136 The Philosophy of Education 

But what is science? One means by a science, 
usually, following the familiar definition of Her- 
bert Spencer, classified knowledge. Some modern 
thinkers like to add to this definition the element 
of verification. Science is thus classified and veri- 
fiable knowledge. It is evident that history, as a 
written record containing classified and verifiable 
knowledge concerning the past activity of man, may 
be called a science. 

But the question, Is history a science ? means to 
imply, also. Is it a natural science .-* Now the knowl- 
edge of nature is the knowledge of determined, not 
self-determined, facts. The atoms and the mole- 
cules, the sun and the stars, act lawfully, but do 
not choose the law of their action. The deeds of 
society, on the other hand, are consequences of voli- 
tions. Men have determined themselves, unlike the 
moon and earth, to obey or disobey the law of their 
own being. Usually feelings, passions, and preju- 
dices, have influenced the decisions of historic actors. 
The historian can never be sure of the motives that 
led to the deeds he describes. This elusive element 
in the historic record of past action is a consequence 
of the self-determining character of the makers of 
history. And this same quality of self-direction in 
men also makes future history unpredictable. The 
astronomer can describe the eclipses of sun and moon 
from now till doomsday, whereas the historian, at best, 
can write only current, not future, history. In the 
light of these facts we may safely conclude that his- 
tory is not a natural science. Nor do the apparent 
predictions of Buckle and modern sociologists as to 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 137 

the number of murders, suicides, and marriages that 
are to come disturb this conclusion, since, after all, 
they are but approximate, not exact. The possibility 
of such approximations in predicting future fact lies 
in the fairly regular uniformity of decision reached 
by self-determining persons in the presence of similar 
situations. Thus the nature of the material with 
which history has to do justifies its place as one of the 
constituent elements of the volitional environment. 
It also justifies the division of the curriculum into the 
three elements, viz., the sciences, the arts, and the 
volitions. 



CHAPTER V 

THE SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF EDUCATION 

(concluded) 

The Nature 2. CONSTITUTIONS. In SO far as nations have acted 
tions°"^*^*^' ^^ nations and expressed their actions in some more 
or less permanent documents, we have constitutions. 
A constitution in the volitional life of a nation corre- 
sponds to epic poetry in its aesthetic life. Both are 
national products, but they come from different 
phases of the nation's life. A constitution is a 
written document containing the fundamental princi- 
ples which a nation, or a state, proposes to enact and 
embody in its national life. *' We, the people of the 
United States, ... do ordain and establish this Con- 
stitution. . . ." The word constitution means struc- 
ture ; the constitution of a nation is the structure of 
that nation, showing the elements of which the 
national life is composed. 

A constitution is a growth ; it is the flowering of 
the national life, the profoundest expression of the 
life of a nation acting as one. The deep principles 
of a nation's being find voice in its constitution. The 
thought of a nation concerning its own life and pur- 
pose is willed into reality in its constitution. Thus 
real constitutions are not artificial documents foisted 
upon a people by agitators but are the people's voli- 

138 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 139 

tional expression of their own nature and destiny. 
The framers of serviceable constitutions are inter- 
preters of national life, they are not makers de novo 
of human society. 

If the written constitution is a real description of 
the nature of a nation, being false to it is a kind of 
national suicide. The only justification that a nation 
can have for changing its constitution is that its con- 
stitution is no longer an expression of its life. Its 
life has grown since the establishment of the consti- 
tution and so demands a new expression. A nation 
that is really alive and growing will from necessity at 
intervals of time consider modifications and amend- 
ments to its constitution. The constitution of a 
nation is like the creed of a church, it is the accept- 
able interpretation of its life at a particular time. To 
revise each under the strain put upon it by an inward 
expanding life is a hopeful sign of progress. In its 
revised constitution the nation wills for itself a future 
truer to its nature and wider in scope. 

3. Law. The third element in the volitional envi- The Nature 
ronment of the pupil is law. In so far as society ^^ ^^' 
acts we have what is called law. The will of society 
concerning the welfare of its members is law. The 
volition of society as law corresponds to the expres- 
sion of its aesthetic life in the drama. 

Law is the rule of human action, established by an 
authority able to enforce its will. Without the power 
to execute, legislation is useless. Law in its original 
intent is what is laid down ; law lays down the acts 
that must and must not be done by the members of 
society in order to preserve the unity of society. 



140 The Philosophy of Education 

Law is not the volition of an act which society has 
already done, but which society must do. In this 
respect law differs from constitutions. The latter 
are an expression of an actual, as law of a desirable, 
condition. 

Law is inherited, or made by the representatives 
of society. The former is Common Law, founded in 
long usage and the decisions of the courts of justice. 
The latter is Statute Law, drawn out in form, and 
distinctly enacted and proclaimed. Society enforces 
law for its own self-preservation, and to insure rights 
of life, limb, and property to its members. 

The making and the enforcing of law is supposed 
to be according to the idea of justice, suum cuique. 
Thus laws are intended to be equitable, to the viola- 
tions of which penalties are fixed. 

The science which has to do with constitutions 
and laws is political science. As the sciences have 
corresponding applied arts, as the arts have basic 
sciences, so the volitions have their sciences also. 
Here again is shown the unity of the products of the 
human mind. 
The Nature 4. A nation, society, and the individual act. The 
of Morality. yQiitiQ^ of the individual in the presence of right and 
wrong is morality, the fourth division of the volitional 
environment. It corresponds to lyric poetry in the 
aesthetic sphere. We have now the action of the 
individual in accord with the personal sense of right 
and duty. It is no longer a question of national or so- 
cial, but of individual action. Here is a sphere in which 
the individual man is the maker and follower or the 
violator of his own enactments. .Moral law is self- 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 141 

legislated law. The following of an alien law which 
the will of the individual does not confirm is not 
morality. 

Morality is enforced by that constitution of things 
whereby evil is self-destructive and good is self-pre- 
servative. The word of evil is, " I am the spirit 
that continually denies." The evil-doer is a self-de- 
stroyer. Good, as against evil, is self-preservative. 
Plato 1 showed that the idea of the good is the princi- 
ple of existence. The constitution of things whereby 
evil is suicidal and good self -conserving is the greatest 
sanction which morality possesses. 

The individual whose life is conserved has the sense 
of the righteousness of the principles upon which he 
acts. When the birth of the moral law in self-con- 
sciousness has once taken place, the tendency is strong 
to conceive of that law as approved by the Ideal Per- 
son, and so the moral law is thought of as the gift of 
God. At this point Kant thinks morality ends and 
religion begins. To him religion is the feeling of the 
moral law as the command of God. In morality a 
man stands in relation to a self-legislated law ; in 
religion, man stands in relation to the Giver of the law. 

Ethics is the science underlying morality. Ethics 
as a science is impossible without the consciousness 
of will. Socrates did not clearly have the conscious- 
ness of will when he taught that knowledge is virtue. 
A knowledge of the nature of volition would have 
indicated that man may know what is right and do 
what is wrong. Knowledge is not virtue, but is the 
means to virtue. Virtue is voluntary action according 

1 " Republic," Book 508, E. 



142 The Philosophy of Education 

to the knowledge of the right. " I see and approve 
the better, but follow the worse," is a familiar fact of 
Roman and modern consciousness. The problem of 
the will of man first came clearly into consciousness 
with St. Augustine. And under the influence of 
Christianity, with its doctrine of man as having a 
soul to save, ethics has had its greatest development. 
TheEduca- Thus WO sec the nature of the volitional envi- 
tionai Value ronmcnt of the child. It remains to inquire what 

of the Voli- ^ 

tions. advantages accrue from its having a place in the 

curriculum. Why should a child be adjusted to the 
volitional (that is practical) element in the social en- 
vironment } 

(i) The child thus becomes conscious that man is, 
and acts as, a part of a social whole. The movements 
of history are the movements of men, not of man. 
Even a king, without his subjects, is impotent. Indi- 
vidualism dies the death from the historic point of 
view. Witness the French Revolution ; society can- 
not exist where the hand of every man is against his 
brother. 

(2) The child thus learns that the social whole is 
composed of individuals, that Uetat c'est moi is a libel 
against the French people. The state is not Louis 
XIV. The Czar of Russia is not Russia. Univer- 
salism, that is, the will of one individual or the will 
of an institution as supreme, also dies the death. 
Witness the subjugation of the individual in the 
East to the caste system, and in China to the idea 
of the family. 

In short, the child learns the individual is a Glied- 
ganzeSf a part-whole. The individual is a whole 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 143 

and he is also a part of a larger whole. It is the 
nature of an individual to be both himself and a socius. 
Individuality is not a narrowly circumscribed sphere, 
but is a large circle inclusive of one'r bellows. The 
individual really finds his own unity in the service he 
can render to many selves. Society itself is a unity, 
through variety. It approaches the conception of an 
organism, in which every part is both means and end 
to every other part. A member of society is both 
an end in himself and a means whereby larger social 
ends are attained. An organism, whether it be the 
body of a person or the figurative body of society, is 
not an individual thing, but a unity of cooperant parts. 
What the individual cell is to the whole bodily organ- 
ism, that, in a figure, is the whole person to society. 
"In history we see how little selves, or individuals, 
unite to form the big self, or the nation." ^ 

(3) The child sees the institutions that his race 
with its life has made, and to which, as his own 
producer, he owes loyal allegiance, viz., the home, 
the school, the civic life, the state, and the church. 
What President Butler calls the institutional sense is 
awakened. 

(4) The child learns in history the essential facts 
of human achievement, — those facts that have made 
present life and thought possible, and which a liber- 
ally educated man cannot afford not to know. 

(5) The pupil's mind is trained to judge through 
the interpretation of the facts of history supplied by 
the memory and quickened by the imagination. The 
training of the judgment is history's great educational 

1 Harris, "Psychologic Foundations of Education," p. 331. 



144 The Philosophy of Education 

value. The finest result of a trained mind is the 
ability to judge. But memory must carry the facts 
of history by means of their logical continuity. And 
through what Macaulay describes as the "historic 
imagination " the pupil must re-live the scenes of the 
past. In teaching history the use of the imagination 
in picturing foreign lives develops an interest in all 
humanity. And without a developed imagination we 
are blind in estimating the inward values of the lives 
of primitive and foreign peoples. 

(6) The study of history and of the whole voli- 
tional environment of the child has the practical 
value of fitting youth for citizenship in a self-govern- 
ing community. It fits for citizenship by develop- 
ing the historic mind, which, without the power of 
prediction, can yet interpret the present by the past, 
and whose foresight is insight. The teaching of his- 
tory assists in reaching the goal for which the public 
school system was instituted, namely, to fit youth for 
life. Men are too widely ignorant of the methods 
and principles of government. The knowledge of 
history, given the deductive power, tends to make a 
man capable in national affairs. 

(7) As the portrayal of the motives of so many 
men and their consequent careers and end, the prac- 
tical element in the social environment is a great 
moral teacher of the pupil, and, apart from the ex- 
ample of respected individuals, and intellectual habits, 
is the greatest influence in the formation of character. 
Character is the product of the will, the embodiment 
of will relations ; character is what a man is in con- 
sequence of what he wills to be. The moral charac- 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 145 

ter of the individual and his will as its basis are 
trained through acquaintanceship with what the will 
of the race has done. 

Thus we see the reasons that justify the place of 
the volitions in the educative curriculum, and here- 
with is ended our account of the reproductive aspect 
of education. Before passing to the other sociologi- 
cal aspects of education, let us gather up and unify 
our thoughts, so far as they have been concerned with 
the nature of education as repeating in the mind of 
the individual the mental products of the race. The 
following general observations may be made on the 
reproductive aspect of education : — 

(i) These three elements, viz., the theoretic, the Observations 
aesthetic, and the volitional, that together constitute arReproVuc" 
the social environment of man, are the products, and ing Racial 
the only products, of the race's mental life. The ^p^"^"^^- 
mind of the race is the mind of the individual writ 
large. The divisions of the spiritual environment as 
given are complete, since based upon the nature of 
the mind that produces that environment. 

(2) What has been here termed the spiritual en- 
vironment of the pupil is identical with the educa- 
tional curriculum. The courses of study offered by 
the school, which men call the curriculum, is neither 
an invention of some genius nor the discovery of some 
explorer ; it is the accumulated racial experience, 
the product of human society as a whole living its 
life in its world. The curriculum of the pupil is the 
career of human progress. The books he studies are 
not the reality ; they are but the temporary earthen 



146 The Philosophy of Education 

vessels in which the treasures of natural and human 
truth are kept. 

(3) The educated man, so far as he is educated, 
has reproduced his race's achievements in his own 
mind, and so has identified his own thinking, feeling, 
and acting with that of his race. Thus education 
socializes and humanizes the prospective members of 
society. 

(4) The essential foundation of education must 
always include representatives of each of the three 
great elements of racial achievement ; that is to say, 
in every curriculum, indeed in every adequate course 
of study pursued by the individual pupil, there must 
be some science, some art, and some volition. A 
good prescribed basis for any education that aims to 
be broad and rounded would perhaps include the 
following subjects, viz., physics, the science of mat- 
ter, the typical inorganic science, acquainting man 
with his natural world ; biology, the science of life, 
the typical organic science, acquainting man with his 
living world ; psychology, the science of mind, the 
typical mental science, acquainting man with his own 
and his fellows' minds ; mathematics, the science of 
number and quantity, acquainting man with the 
tools wherewith to express his mastery of his world ; 
grammar, the science of language, the door to litera- 
ture. Of these last two subjects Mommsen writes : 
" The art of measuring brings the world into sub- 
jection to man ; the art of writing prevents his knowl- 
edge from perishing along with himself : together 
they make him — what Nature has not made him — 
all-powerful and eternal." To this list of sciences 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 147 

would be added from the arts, doubtless, literature, 
as the most accessible of the arts, language alone 
being the necessary preparation, and also as per- 
haps the most serviceable educationally. To these 
sciences and arts must be added history, as the 
most usable form of expression of the human will. 
An educational foundation laid in these studies is 
sufficiently stable and broad to support any later 
superstructure in the form of electives or profes- 
sional training. These, or equally representative 
studies, cannot in wisdom be omitted from any plan 
of culture. Yet, when this is said, it must also be 
always added that a liberal education is rather an 
attitude of mind than a knowledge of courses. Not 
what enters the mind, but what comes out of it, 
betokens liberality of training. These are simply 
the courses of study that would seem most easily to 
secure the desired attitude of mind. 

It is interesting to compare with these seven sub- 
jects the so-called seven liberal arts of the Middle 
Age curriculum, viz., grammar, logic, rhetoric, arith- 
metic, geometry, astronomy, and music. These two 
curricula differ from each other as mediaeval and 
modern life. The one is formal, fitting for verbal dis- 
putations ; the other is real, fitting for social service. 
To the mediaeval life the modern world has added 
progress in science, indicating that man is now a 
citizen of earth as well as of heaven. The modern 
life, beginning with the Renascence, has also been 
conscious of the continuity of human development as 
revealed in history. So the modern curriculum, as 
the effect and cause of modern life, has added to the 



148 The Philosophy of Education 

mediaeval curriculum the subjects of natural science 
and history. 

(5) After the foundation of education is laid in 
these sufficient and representative subjects, it is evi- 
dent from the magnitude of the human achievement 
that necessity is laid upon managers of education to 
provide a selection of studies for the superstructure. 
The sum total of human knowledge, art, and history 
is so great that some form of the elective system is 
unavoidable. It would take a man a lifetime to pur- 
sue all the courses offered by a single modern great 
university. The best curriculum is not the pre- 
scribed, which denies to the individual the freedom 
of choosing the subject-matter wherein he will develop 
himself, and tends to rid him of that sense of responsi- 
bility through which alone strength comes. Neither 
is the best curriculum the free elective, which permits 
superficial scattering and the omission of one or two 
of the three great elements of human achievement, 
viz., science, art, and volition. But the best curricu- 
lum combines the principles of prescription and free- 
dom in a system of study wherein no great body of 
human activity is omitted while at the same time 
the student does thorough-going systematic work 
somewhere. Thus both breadth and depth are 
received ; both narrowness and superficiality are 
avoided. Narrowness was the vice of the old pre- 
scribed system ; superficiality is the vice of the free 
elective system. Thorough discipline was the virtue 
of the old prescribed system ; freedom of self-expres- 
sion is the virtue of the free elective system. The 
best system keeps the virtues and omits the vices of 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 149 

the two others. This is the so-called "group " system, 
which represents our contemporary collegiate educa- 
tional progress. In this system the curriculum which 
represents the student's spiritual environment is di- 
vided usually, according to its nature, into three 
groups of studies, viz., the sciences, the languages 
and literatures, and history, etc., corresponding in 
general to the elements of the environment as pre- 
viously defined. The student must put his major 
strength in one of these groups, chosen by himself, 
and divide his minor strength between each of the 
other two. Within the group his choice is condi- 
tioned only by the nature of the courses themselves. 
Herein is opportunity afforded for the student to 
study thoroughly what he prefers, to the neglect 
of nothing essential for liberal culture. This group 
system represents the natural progress of the elect- 
ive principle out of perfect freedom into that free- 
dom within safe limits which characterizes all things 
human as well as educational.^ 

The necessary presence of some form of the elect- 
ive system in a modern curriculum indicates that the 
educated man is not he who has appreciated all beauty, 
willed all goodness, known all truth, but enough of 
these necessary things has he compassed to open his 
life to the message they have to give. The educated 
man does not know everything, but rather how and 
where to find anything ; he is not an encyclopaedia 
possessing all knowledge in storage, but a powerful 
mind possessing a certain adequate method in the 

1 The "group" system exists to-day in Yale, Leland Stanford Jr., 
the University of ^H^^ui? Dartmouth, and Williams. 



tion of Edu- 
cation. 



150 The Philosophy of Education 

attainment of knowledge. An educated man strives 
to know everything about something and something 
about most things. Some truth he knows, and to all 
truth he is open. Striving to be an expert himself in 
some matters, he has faith in the opinion of other ex- 
perts. Thus education is not so much an attainment 
as an attitude, not so much an achievement as a spirit. 
Third Defini- We have now defined the nature of the racial 
environment, in the adjustment to which, by men- 
tally reproducing it, consists the education of the 
child from the sociological point of view. And so 
we are prepared to add this new element to the defi- 
nition of education reached at the end of the preced- 
ing discussion ; and with this result, Education is the 
superior adjustment to his intellectual, emotional^ and 
volitional enviro7iment of a physically developed con- 
scious human being. 

Our growing definition of the conception of educa- 
tion is becoming clumsy, but perhaps it is also becom- 
ing more comprehensive and more adequate to the 
complex subject it would define. To this, our empiri- 
cal conception of education, there remains but one 
element to add, viz., the psychological. Before pass- 
ing into that territory, however, we must face the 
two remaining questions of this present sociological 
inquiry, viz., What are the social effects of reproduc- 
ing in educational institutions the spiritual environ- 
ment of the race } and, What practical consequences 
follow for education from this sociological aspect of 
the discussion } 
SociaiEffects To take the first question, there are three effects 
ofEducation. ^pon society of having its members educated, that is, 



vative Effect 
of Education. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 151 

reproduce their racial heritage. These effects are : 
(i) the conservation of the past ; (2) the preservation 
of the present ; and (3) the progress of the future. 
Education conserves, preserves, and produces. It is 
evident that here we shall find the social justification, 
indeed, the social necessity, of educational endeavor. 
Let us give brief attention to each of these effects. 

I. The conservative effect of education. Educa- TheConser- 
tion conserves the advances of the race, so that past 
life was not lived in vain. The fragments of past 
achievements and experience are gathered up that 
nothing be lost. Other men labored and the edu- 
cated man enters into their labors. Having repro- 
duced in large outline a portion of the race's work, 
the educated man begins the work of the world where 
the race before him has left it ; he takes up and bears 
forward the burden of progress which his forbears 
have laid down with their lives. The growth of 
human civilization is Hke the upward mounting of 
the coral reef in the midst of the sea, — each worker 
rises upon the shoulders of his predecessors. 

By conserving and using the past, education be- 
comes the guardian of civilization, the transmitter of 
its products, the keeper of its heirlooms, the treas- 
ure-house of its priceless heritages. But for it, each 
man entering the world would find the house of 
knowledge empty, would have to begin his work at 
the origin of the sciences, the arts, and the volitions, 
instead of at their present conclusion. If the men 
of one generation forgot their Greek and lost their 
books, the learning of it again would be like decipher- 
ing the Egyptian hieroglyph or the Babylonian cunei- 



152 The Philosophy of Education 

form. If the men of one generation forgot their 
science and lost their books, the work of the race, of 
Ptolemy and Copernicus, would have to be repeated. 
Destroy the temple of knowledge which was forty 
centuries in building, and only divine power could 
raise it again in three days. 

Beside this far-reaching conception of education as 
the great conservation of human society, how paltry 
and unworthy the notion that the scholar is a neg- 
ligible factor in modern progress ! Rather does edu- 
cation make possible the taking of one's place in the 
continuity of the best life of the race. It preserves 
the past as the basis upon which to build the more 
stately mansions of human welfare. 

As Professor Dewey has so freshly expressed it : 
** All that society has accomplished for itself it puts, 
through the agency of the school, at the disposal of 
its future members. All its better thoughts of itself 
it hopes to realize through the new possibilities thus 
opened to its future self." ^ 
The Preser- 2. The preservation of the present. Education 
pfeTent!^^^^ protccts socicty. This it does by developing self-con- 
trol in the individual members of society and by bind- 
ing their affections to the human institutions and to 
law and order. He who has reproduced the racial 
attainments in his own conscious development appre- 
ciates their nature and value. He who knows him- 
self to be the recipient of the racial possessions feels 
himself committed to keeping them. It were a kind 
of parenticide for an educated man to attack the insti- 
tutions of society whose life he bears in mind and body. 
1 John Dewey, "The School and Society," p. 19. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 153 

There are three considerations that will serve to 
emphasize this protective aspect of education, viz., 
the founders of society have recognized it, the influ- 
ence of education on crime shows it, and society as a 
would-be organism demands it. To take separately 
and briefly each of these considerations. 

And first, how the framers and reformers of human The Attitude 
societies have regarded education as a protection. ca«onof'^^" 
Plato's " Republic," the first in time of a long list of Founders of 
Utopias and among the best, is also the first scientific °*^^^ ^^^* 
treatise on education, and Dr. W. H. Payne has paid 
it the tribute of classing it with Rousseau's " Emile " 
and Spencer's " Education " as the three best discus- 
sions in all literature on the subject. In the "Repub- 
lic" it is by education that the ideal society once 
established is to be maintained, and the paradox is 
announced that philosophers are to be kings. The 
philosopher was the beau ideal of Plato's system of 
education. 

Following the Reformation, there was a great re- 
vival of interest in the common schools. When it 
was judged by Luther and his followers that men 
must save themselves religiously by the exercise of 
faith and private judgment after the reading and 
study of the Bible, it was necessary that men must be 
educated to read, study, and think. Without educa- 
tion, the new element of individual liberty projected 
into human society could not have maintained itself. 

Our third illustration shall be America. In his 
fond Farewell Address to the people of his country, 
Washington used the winged words now known to 
all, " In proportion as the structure of a government 



154 The Philosophy of Education 

gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public 
opinion be enlightened." And the author of the 
Declaration of Independence, in a letter to Washing- 
ton dated January 4, 1786, then wrote, "It is an 
axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe 
but in the hands of the people themselves, and that, 
too, of the people with a certain degree of instruc- 
tion." ^ 

Emerson said, ** America means opportunity." 
The individual citizen by the right of suffrage at the 
polls determines national principles and policies. For 
the safe exercise of this mighty prerogative, enlight- 
enment is the necessary prerequisite. *' We must 
educate the masses because they are our masters." 
*' The citizen is king and the ballot is his sceptre." 
In a republican form of government, the illiterate are 
ciphers or the opportunity of the unprincipled. The 
school unites with the library in the message, " The 
commonwealth requires the education of her people 
as the safeguard of order and liberty." 

In these modern days no one more pointedly than 
the president of Harvard has described '' The Func- 
tion of Education in Democratic Society " and urged 
it upon our attention. ''Moreover," he writes, "the 
fundamental object of democratic education — -to lift 
the whole population to a higher plane of intelligence, 
conduct, and happiness — has not yet been perfectly 
apprehended even in the United States." ^ 
Education Secondly, the influence of education on crime 

shows the preservative and protective social effects of 

1 Henderson, "Jefferson on Public Education," p. 312. 

2 C. W. Eliot, " Educational Reform," p. 403. 



and Crime. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 155 

education. Crime is conduct which the state disap- 
proves and penalizes. Its origin when analyzed seems 
to inhere partly in the will of man, largely in his 
physiological constitution in the form of inherited 
criminal tendencies, and mainly in the influence 
of contaminating environment. Ignorance does not 
seem to be a direct cause of criminal inclination ; 
rather are ignorance and crime joint products of de- 
fective initiative, weak inheritance, and hard environ- 
ment. 

It is evident that, since ignorance is not the imme- 
diate cause of crime, education, in so far as it ban- 
ishes ignorance, cannot directly banish crime. Where 
education only succeeds in banishing ignorance, it 
becomes often a weapon for social attack instead of 
social defence. 

There are three ways in which education can cope, 
and increasingly is coping, with crime in society. 
These ways correspond to the three sources of crime 
as just stated. First, by reaching the feelings and 
the will of man, as well as his intellect, refining the 
one and strengthening the other, so that crime in the 
one case becomes repulsive and in the other conquer- 
able. Just how education can work partially these 
changes in disposition is a psychological question, 
whose discussion we must postpone till the succeeding 
chapter. And the right intellectual point of view of 
society which makes attack upon it difficult is par- 
tially secured in so far as the curriculum brings the 
student into the consciousness of his unity with his 
fellows. The mental reproduction of the racial achieve- 
ments is a socializing process. 



156 The Philosophy of Education 

Second, inherited criminal tendencies are being 
dealt with early in life while the organism is plastic. 
They are being thwarted by the development of 
counter social impulses in two influential school 
agencies, viz., the kindergarten and manual training. 
The kindergarten idea is the rationalization of play, 
thereby developing the communal sense. Through 
the securing of desirable reactions on correct social 
stimuli, correct social feelings and virtues are 
developed. The evil innate tendencies are overcome 
with good disclosed tendencies. An embryonic 
criminal can be saved to himself and society before 
the age of six when he might not be at nine. 

The manual training school is a second great new 
way for dealing with inherited criminal impulses. He 
whose nature leads him to destroy is taught to pro- 
duce. The rough wood, yielding to the movements 
of hand and tool, teaches the fact and the force of hon- 
esty and accuracy. The reformatories for youth have 
been quick to utilize this moral value in manual 
training. 

Let us not be forgetful, either, of the educational 
agency of athletics in suppressing criminal physiolog- 
ical inclination. By muscular exercise manly virtues 
are grown to supplant weak tendencies. Health, and 
the love of it ; a sound physique, and a respect for it, 
— these make immorality and vice difficult. 

Third, the forces of an environment hostile to the 
best interests of man, which are the main source, 
after all, of crime, are being dealt with in many ways 
by the influences that education disengages. The 
hold of crime on the individual member of society 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 157 

must continually tend to decrease as his environment 
makes crime increasingly difficult. As educational 
influences get possession of the environment of man, 
that environment offers less opportunity to crime. 
Among the influences that hamper crime, set free by 
education in the environment, are to be noted the 
illumination of our cities ; the skilled methods of de- 
tecting crime by photography, electricity, chemistry, 
thumb-impressions, etc. ; the better administration of 
justice, tending in young and old to reform, and not 
to harden; prison reform, probationary sentences, 
humaner punishments, the regulation of the saloon, 
and the growing public sentiment against crime as 
unsocial. Through these and similar social checks, 
the indirect influence of education in diminishing 
crime is greater than its direct. 

The evidence of statistics on the question of educa- 
tion and crime is uncertain. In 1892 Proal showed 
that advance in education did not necessarily mean 
a diminution of crime. Most statisticians seem to 
think that crime is increasing. The fact probably is 
that the number of offences is increasing, due to the 
multiplication of minor ordinances, while the disposi- 
tion to commit immoral crime is doubtless decreasing. 
On this point Professor Falkner writes : ^ " Crime in 
the broadest sense, including all offenses punished by 
law, has probably increased slightly in the last twenty- 
five years. On the other hand, crime in its deeper 
moral sense, as we are apt to picture it, has greatly 
decreased. Changes in our environment, not changes 
in our moral standards, have multiplied minor offences. 

1 Forum, July, 1900, " Is Crime Increasing ?" 



158 The Philosophy of Education 



Educational 
Supply and 
Social 
Demand. 



The increase of crime which our modern Ufe reveals is 
thus a social and not a moral phenomenon." 

Putting these things about education and crime 
together, we may say that education, in so far as it 
succeeds in socializing the individual, in moralizing 
his will, in cleansing his nervous system of the evil 
taint of heredity, and in providing an environment 
conducive to law and order, is tending to diminish 
crime, and thus discloses its protective effect in 
human society. 

Our third consideration mentioned above, to show 
the protective character of education, was the demand 
made upon the school by society, as a would-be 
organism, for protection. As Kant has taught us to 
think, an organism is such an assemblage of parts 
that each part is both means and end to every other 
part. The human body is such an organism. It is 
evident that the body politic, with all its present strife, 
dissension, and discord, is not as yet an organism. 
Its members war against each other. Its diversity 
of parts is so great that no harmonious unity appears. 
And yet the forces that civilize are unifying. Society 
holds before itself as the hmit of its progress a unified 
whole of cooperant parts. 

During the slow progress of society toward this, its 
ultimate and natural goal, internal needs are devel- 
oped. The school exists for the discovery and the 
satisfaction of those needs. In its dire want, society's 
instinct of self-preservation leads it to turn to the 
school for succor and protection. In Germany, after 
the devastation wrought by Napoleon, this instinct of 
self-preservation in society, leading it to lay hold on 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 159 

the school for assistance, found a voice in Fichte, 
crying that in the foundation of universities and 
schools the desired regeneration of society could be 
effected. 

Continually before our eyes is the spectacle of a 
changing curriculum. It means that society, as it 
grows, is ever developing new needs, and the school 
is ever hastening to meet them. Society felt its need 
from of old of lawyers, doctors, and ministers, and 
the school had its three faculties of law, medicine, 
and theology. In modern times society has discov- 
ered its need of the business man, the trained teacher, 
the mechanic, and the engineer, and quickly have 
corresponding educational supplies been established. 
Society gives its positions of responsibility and power 
to the expert ; education trains the expert and teaches 
men to trust him. Those who have to do with direct- 
ing educational institutions are the first to recognize 
that it is for society to demand and for them to sup- 
ply. As Professor Dewey says,^ **The modification 
going on in the method and curriculum of education 
is as much a product of the changed social situation, 
and as much an effort to meet the needs of the new 
society that is forming, as are changes in modes of 
industry and commerce." And similarly President 
Eliot wrote earlier,^ " The university must accom- 
modate itself promptly to significant changes in the 
character of the people for whom it exists." 

Education is thus a matter of social effectiveness. 
It protects society from suffering want. *' Education 

1 "The School and Society," p. 20. 

2 « Educational Reform," p. 35. 



i6o The Philosophy of Education 

is the instinctive effort which the social body makes 
to adapt itself to vital needs. ... A right habit 
of mind becomes, then, no mere accomplishment or 
grace ; it is a condition of continued national activ- 
ity." 1 This adaptive effort on the part of the social 
organism is exerted chiefly upon its still growing tis- 
sue, upon its younger members in school, who are 
plastic and susceptible to vital change. 

Remembering what has now been said about the 
importance accorded to education by the founders of 
human societies, about the influence of education on 
crime, and about education's supply to society's de- 
mand, we have before us the notion of education as 
the preservation of the present. 
Future 3. The progress of the future. This is the third 

Progress. social effect of education. Here it is that education 
passes out of the service of conserving and protecting 
into that of actively initiating. Society needs aggres- 
sive leaders as well as wise protectors and cautious 
saviours. Education does well to reproduce, and by 
reproducing to conserve the past ; it does well to 
protect the past in the present ; it does best of all in 
adding to the present accumulation of knowledge and 
power, thus making possible a future better than the 
past. This is progress indeed. The form of progress 
we have already seen to be through disintegration 
into unity. Its content we have now to define as ad- 
vancement in the knowledge of men and things, in 
the use of such knowledge in directing the powers of 
nature and in the relief of the estate of man, and, 

1 Withers, Contemporary Review, June, 1900, "New Authorities in 
English Education." 



The Sociological Aspect of Education i6i 

finally, in the enjoyment of such knowledge and its 
use. In brief, progress is the increasing self-posses- 
sion of the race in its world. Among the many kinds 
of men that make this progress possible are to be 
found the scholars. 

There are two general discipHnes constituting the 
educational curriculum that represent respectively 
the conservative and the progressive tendencies, viz., 
the humanities and the sciences. The historians 
and the linguists are by training cautious ; the 
scientists, daring. In those countries, like China 
and India, where science has gained no foothold, 
little or no progress is found. The progress of the 
West, in contrast, is bound up with science. 

It is the application of the knowledge of the scien- 
tist that has given us our modern world of comfort, 
convenience, and monumental productivity. A lead- 
ing contemporary,^ in an editorial expression on ^'The 
University as a Wealth Producer," thus conjoins edu- 
cation and commercial progress : " Men must take 
nature into partnership in order to succeed in large 
undertakings ; and the interpreters of nature are the 
scientists. It is they who put the great manufac- 
turers, organizers, and captains of industry in touch 
with the forces that produce wealth ; and the univer- 
sity is at the heart of the great modern movement of 
production." 

Progress in knowledge of whatever kind must 
always come only from him who is already familiar 
with what has been done in his field. In our univer- 
sities scholars become abreast of their fields, they thus 

1 The Outlook, March 15, 1902. 

M 



1 62 The Philosophy of Education 

know where to begin original work, and so human 
knowledge grows. 

Likewise, in the making of history, it takes a man 
of knowledge and of power to achieve those things 
that are both new and good. The legislator must 
come more and more to wait for and consider the 
word of the historian and the sociologist. The 
scholar himself in politics is a growing figure in mod- 
ern times. Let it grow ! 

It seems to be less true in art than in either science 
or history that an educated man is necessary for prog- 
ress. There are certain presuppositions in each art, 
of course, which the artist must know. These are 
matters of technique. Knowing these, the artist 
brings a great deal of his law with him. Production 
in art seems subject to no definable law. The artist 
simply expresses himself, in material terms, for the 
most part as he will. The great demand laid upon 
him is that he have a self to express : that is, that he 
be original. Progress in art does not come from the 
imitators, but from the originators. Education has 
nothing to do with creating originality. It can only 
develop it, and supply it with its tools. 

To show the secondary place of education in the 
advancement of the arts, the common names of the 
arts and artists will suffice. The poet, for example, 
is, literally, a maker. A common thought of the 
Divine Being is, the Maker. Therefore the poet has 
always been considered, in a way, divine, subject to 
the influence of the divimis afflatus. Music, for ex- 
ample again, is literally " belonging to the Muses " ; 
in its Greek original it referred to all the arts, now 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 163 

limited to the art of tones alone. The musician must 
conform to the law of tones, but the expression of 
self that he puts into it is original, as though the Muse 
had inspired him. As an artist, man is most divine. 
In art we have the work of the productive imagination ; 
the artist combining old past experiences in new 
forms. Some think of an infinite mind as being able 
to bring things into existence. The finite artist's 
mind can combine the old elements in new shapes. 

Because of the original element in art, one cannot 
say that education makes art possible. One can only- 
say that education facilitates advancement in the 
arts. The forms of his art education can give; the 
life of his art is what the man puts into it himself. 

One statistical fact will illustrate how education 
provides society with men who can do substantial 
things. An investigation carried on some time ago 
by President Thwing ^ of Western Reserve University 
showed that one out of every forty graduates as 
against one out of every ten thousand non-graduates 
of the entire population reached a degree of distinc- 
tion sufficient to give them a place in Appleton's 
" Cyclopaedia of Biography," a proportion in favor of 
the college man by two hundred and fifty to one. 

Having now defined the nature of the spiritual 
environment of man and seen what the social effects 
of its reproduction are, it only remains to consider 
the third question of this chapter, viz.. What practical 
consequences follow for education from this socio- 
logical aspect of the general discussion. To these 
we now come. 

1 Cf. Harris, " Psychologic Foundations of Education," p. 338, note. 



164 The Philosophy of Education 

Practical (i) It is evident from what has preceded that the 

quinces for school as an institution is not a question simply of 
Education, teacher and pupil, but of society and its members. 
Education is one of the functions of society. Com- 
menting on a recent educational text, Professor 
Hanus writes : ^ *' Education is primarily a social 
study like economics or government. The develop- 
ment of the individual is fruitless unless it proceeds 
with constant reference to his membership in the 
contemporary social organism, and the maintenance, 
organization, and direction of education constitute one 
of the most important functions of society." 

President Butler recently said, " As the century 
closes, the soundest educational philosophy the world 
over teaches that the individual alone is nothing, but 
that the individual as a member of society and of a 
race is everything." 

Professor Natorp likewise sees the innermost heart 
of education in the training of the will as conditioned 
by the life of a community, and, again, as condition- 
ing that life. 

Indeed, it may be said with justice that the right 
kind of education is society's greatest and gravest 
problem, for in the last analysis the school is society 
shaping itself to its future ends. 

(2) The best society and the largest development 
of the individual are really at one, since the largest 
individual is really the best aid to society. President 
Ehot says : 2 '' For the individual, concentration and 

1 Science, June 29, 1900, reviewing Welton, "The Logical Bases of 
Education." 

2 " Educational Reform," p. 13. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 165 

the highest development of his own peculiar faculty, 
is the only prudence. But for the state, it is variety, 
not uniformity, of intellectual product, which is need- 
ful." 

(3) The school must emphasize its cooperative and 
not its individualistic methods, if it would best pre- 
pare its pupils for life in society. The accusation 
against the school has been that the educated man is 
unfit to live with his fellows or to help them, but fit 
only for the study of books. " Many people draw a 
distinction between an educated and a practical man ; 
but true education is, after all, nothing but systematic 
study and practice under guidance." The school 
must quicken the social sense. This it can do by the 
use of such means as tramping parties, excursions, 
school exercises, team work in athletics, the study 
of men in common by visiting shops and business 
houses, the study of nature in common, in geographi- 
cal and geological expeditions, etc. " Preparation for 
life is participation in life." 

(4) The school must understand that its main 
material, books, are poor substitutes for experience ; 
that truth is life and not a knowledge of books ; that 
we learn from books really only when their contents 
are interpreted by life and experience. Books inter- 
pret and expand experience, but they do not supply 
it. Books are artificial, life is real. Professor 
Dewey tells of some children in Moline, on the 
banks of the Mississippi, who were surprised to learn 
that the Mississippi River of their geography had 
anything to do with the river running past their 
doors. 



1 66 The Philosophy of Education 

(5) The child must see in his daily occupation 
something of eternal and human significance. Since 
each thing is a part of all things, it bears part of the 
significance of all. If he is studying, he is really re- 
peating in his own consciousness past or present life. 
If he is working, he is contributing to the needs of 
the social whole. To gain the sense of the value and 
dignity of the daily routine requires imagination and 
insight. 

(6) Parents should make the pupils feel that home 
and school are working in alliance. The school is a 
necessary extension of the idea and influence of the 
home. What every parent begins by doing in the 
home but cannot continue, that the school completes. 
In a notable article on " School Reform," Professor 
Miinsterbergi insists on this copartnership of home 
and school as the present needed school reform, second 
in importance only to securing teachers who know 
their subjects. 

(7) The school should supply to the pupil what 
the society which he will enter needs. Now, human 
societies differ with the races that form them. The 
needs of the different races of the human family are 
not identical. Where education is concerned with 
different races, the first question is. What are the 
needs and capacities of this race ? The second ques- 
tion is. What culture material ought the curriculum 
to provide that will best meet this race's needs and 
develop this race's capacities ? Only in barest outline 
is human nature the same the world over. There 
must be an adaptation of educational material to 

1 Atlantic Monthly y May, 1900. 



The Sociological Aspect of Education 167 

racial nature. Each race should have developed 
through its education those traits which are 
nature's characteristic gift to it. Thus human 
society gains the strength of a diversity of gifts, 
and avoids the weakness of uniformity. You can- 
not make a good Filipino, or a good African, by 
supplying an education that would make a good 
Anglo-Saxon. 

Herewith is completed the long account of the 
process whereby the social nature of the being to be 
educated is developed through mentally re-living the 
race's life. We have seen the nature of that environ- 
ment through adjustment to which man is educated, 
the effects for society of such adjustment, and the 
practical consequences that follow for educators from 
this sociological discussion. But our pupil, upon 
whose nature depended the nature of education, which 
we are seeking to define, was characterized by yet 
another possession. The life embodied in physical 
form, and living in conjunction with other life, is 
directed by intelligence. Our pupil is an individual 
consciousness, in addition to his other characteris- 
tics. Perhaps he is this essentially. But this very 
individual it is whom our preceding discussions have 
not specifically considered. We shall want to know 
what the effect upon the individual mind is of repeat- 
ing its race's experience, of learning something of its 
science, of enjoying something of its beauty, and of 
living through its movements. But psychology is 
the science of the mind, and to answer our question 
we must turn next to the psychological aspect of 
education. 



1 68 The Philosophy of Education 



REFERENCES ON THE SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF 
EDUCATION 

Burrage and Bailey, School Sanitation and Decoration. 

Butler, The Meaning of Education, pp. 17-32. 

Dewey, The School and Society, Chap. I. 

Dutton, Social Phases of Education, pp. 201 et seq. 

Eliot, Educational Reform, Chap. XVIII. 

Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, History as a Science. 

Hanus, Educational Aims, V. 

Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, Chaps. XXXVI 
and XXXVIII. 

Hegel, The Philosophy of History, Introduction. 

Howerth, Education and the Social Ideal, Educational Review^ 
September, 1902. 

Lotze, Microcosmos, Bk. VII, Chap. II. 

Martineau, Seat of Authority in Religion, Bk. I, Chap. IV. 

Miinsterberg, Psychology and Life, Essay on Psychology and 
History. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT OF EDUCATION 

The characteristic of the pupil which remains to 
be considered is inteUigence; and the question that 
remains to be answered is, What is the effect upon Education, 
the maturing intelHgence of working through the car'^c^on?" 
racial attainment ? The consideration of these mat- sidered. 
ters constitutes the psychological aspect of education. 
Since it is the individual after all, and not society as 
a whole, that is really being educated, it is apparent 
that this psychological inquiry is closer to the nature 
of education than any of the preceding discussions. 

What is the effect upon the individual mind of 
reproducing its social inheritance.'' To answer, it 
must be remembered that mental reproduction is 
mental activity, and that mental activity means men- 
tal growth. The individual mind that works its way 
through what the race has worked out in consequence 
grows. In possessing and assimilating its spiritual 
environment, the mind is quickened, and expands out 
of its potentiality into its true nature. Through par- 
ticipation in the life of the race the rnind of the indi- 
vidual finds its real self, develops its natural powers. 
Through the educational process every mind builds 
its own world, conquers its own environment, and 
thereby realizes its own capacity. In brief, the psy- 
chological effect upon the mind of repeating its race's 

169 



lyo The Philosophy of Education 

experience is the development of its potential powers 
into actuality. Education, psychologically considered, 
is mental development. When the significance of this 
statement becomes clear in the following discussion, 
we shall then have yet another essential element to 
add to our definition of the nature of education. 

Having touched here upon the heart of our empiri- 
cal inquiry concerning the conception of education, 
we must attempt to justify and give meaning to the 
observations just made. This can be done by consid- 
ering the three following questions that arise out of 
our introductory statements above, viz. : What is the 
nature of that activity of mind whereby it develops } 
What is the nature of that development which takes 
place in mind through its activity ? And what are 
the characteristics of the developed mind ^ 

To take the first question, it is evident upon intro- 
spection that the mind's activity in getting and 
assimilating its spiritual inheritance is its own. The 
mind is the source of its own reactions upon its world. 
Having power within itself, the mind commands this 
power upon occasion; it sets itself to work. Such 
activity is properly described as self-activity. This 
principle of self-activity in consciousness is the root 
of all knowledge, feeling, and will. Without the 
mind's response to its world there is no world. 
Through the mind's response to its world, all science, 
art, and action result. This basic power of conscious- 
ness whereby it expresses itself and interprets its 
world is the presupposition of education as viewed by 
psychology. Without mental activity there is no 
mental growth. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 171 

To define this central notion of self-activity more 
closely as it discovers itself in consciousness, an illus- 
tration may be used. A billiard-ball moves mechani- 
cally according to an impact from the outside. A 
man's mind moves teleologically according to an idea 
on the inside. A vis a tergo moves the ball, a vis a 
f route moves the mind. The one is the object of 
impact; the other is the subject of impulses. The 
one is directed by external forces ; the other directs 
itself. Self-activity, then, as a principle in conscious- 
ness, means self -direction. It is the mind's abihty to 
frame and to follow self-appointed goals. " Con- 
scious effort in the evolution of possibilities is termed 
self -activity." ^ To quote from Dr. Harris, '' Self- 
activity itself we perceive in ourselves by introspec- 
tion. When we look within, we become aware of free 
energy which acts as subject and object under the 
forms of feeling, thought, and volition." ^ 

This is self-activity as manifested in consciousness. 
With its manifestation goes, as a consequence, self- 
development. The psychological aim of education, 
viz., to develop the mental self of the pupil, is pos- 
sible only through the activity of that self. It is a 
universal law that growth can come only through 
activity. By using, we gain. The use of capital is 
interest. The plant's use of natural stimuli enables 
it to grow. Muscular exercise means muscular devel- 
opment. Just so self-activity is the mode of self- 
development. 

Indeed, one may say the law is not simply uni- 

1 Boyer, " Principles and Practice of Teaching," p. 35. 

2 Harris, " Psychologic Foundations of Education," p. 31. 



172 The Philosophy of Education 



The Insuf- 
ficiency of 
Rational 
Psychology. 



versal, but is a law of the universe itself, as we know 
it in time. Since the days of Heraclitus no observa- 
tion of man has been commoner than that all things 
change. Modern astronomy, geology, and biology 
have shown the unity of these changes in one vast 
system of cosmic development. The changes occur 
within the whole system of reality beyond which 
there is nothing to cause change. Manifestly, then, 
the whole system, as a unity including change, is 
self-active. The development of the universe in 
time is conditioned by the principle of self-activity. 
It is not surprising, then, but natural, that man, the 
microcosm, reflecting the macrocosm, should find his 
own self-development only in his own self-activity. 
" My Father worketh hitherto and I work." 

From the beginning until now it has been the good 
service of rational psychology to insist upon self- 
activity as the central principle in consciousness. 
This truth is still true ; the mind does react by means 
of its own nature upon the sensuous material pre- 
sented to it, and upon its own conscious states. But 
this rationalistic view of the mind is inadequate, not 
so much because of what it does say as because of 
what it does not say. This point of view regards 
the mind as mature, as independent of its material 
environment, and as individual. It omits to consider 
the mind as growing through its immaturity into 
maturity, as conditioned in its manifestations by 
states of the brain and body, and as reaching its true 
nature through contact with fellow minds. The 
rationaUstic psychology is not supplanted, but it is 
to-day supplemented by the genetic, the experi- 
mental, and the social. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 173 

In the words of Professor Dewey, "Genetic psy- 
chology, instead of being set over against rational 
psychology, thus becomes a necessary instrument for 
translating the more or less vague, abstract, and 
nominal propositions of the latter, into concrete and 
realizable form. Of course we are far enough from 
an attainment of this ideal but surely this is the point 
of view from which to regard it. . . . What is most 
needed in education is, I take it, the connecting links, 
the intermediate terms lying between the formal 
general principles and the specific details — a con- 
nection which will make the former workable while 
it illuminates and emancipates the latter. And I do 
not believe that these connecting links can be found 
except in a psychology conceived in a somewhat more 
experimental and less purely rationalistic form than 
that of Dr. Harris." 1 

It is the merit of the newer modes of psychological The Educa^ 
study to analyze into some detail and define with ^\°efo^^he 
some care the way in which the principle of self- Newer 
activity works in growing minds, and also to describe ^^^ ° °^^* 
the stages of the mind's natural development. With 
the former of these services we are now particularly 
concerned as we continue the answer to the first psy- 
chological question concerning the nature of educa- 
tion, viz.. What is the nature of that activity of mind 
whereby it develops .'' To the latter service we must 
return in attempting the answer to our second psycho- 
logical question. 

The activity of the self differentiates itself in a 

1 John Dewey, Educational Review, Vol. XVI, " Harris's Psycho- 
logic Foundations of Education." 



ment. 



174 The Philosophy of Education 

number of ways. This differentiation is logical, not 
psychological, that is, what we concretely find in the 
growing self is not first a bare principle of self-activity 
which later separates itself into its parts, but is a 
number of ways of reacting on its world, all display- 
ing the principle of self-activity. These concrete 
Internal ways of manifesting its active nature that the self 
M^ntar^ has and whereby it realizes its powers are too many 
Develop- and too familiar to describe in detail. The list in- 
cludes the appetite for better cognition which we 
call curiosity; the impulse to originate mentally, 
which we call invention, and whereby progress is 
possible; the demand of the aesthetic sense for 
rhythm, form, color, and the perfect manifestations 
of the types of life ; the tendency of all young minds 
to do what is socially approved, and so to satisfy the 
sense of right ; the unwillingness to be surpassed by 
an equal, which we name emulation, and which is re- 
sponsible for the various forms of competition of the 
child's world ; the instinct to have and to hold what 
comes within the range of the senses, leading to the 
sense of ownership ; the tendency to avoid all forms 
of pain and secure the things that give pleasure, 
which is the instinct of self-preservation ; the impulse 
to make and to break, to build up and to tear down, 
to put together and to pull apart, so educative of the 
motor centres, and which has been named the con- 
structive impulse, — all these are familiar and typical 
ways that the immature mind of the child has of 
developing itself through its reactive power. 

From this list we have reserved for fuller considera- 
tion, because of their supreme educational importance. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 175 

the three factors of imitation, interest, and effort. Three 
This trinity of wonderful words, each representing a AgendeTof 
way in which the self -active mind works out its own Mental 
growth, almost covers the theoretical part of con- mem."^" 
temporary educational discussions. They are the 
bases of our pedagogical orthodoxies and heresies. To 
defend imitation is likely to bring down upon one's self 
the demand of the individualists in education that the 
independence of the pupil must be safeguarded. To 
defend interest is sure to elicit anathemas from the 
strenuous duty-lovers. And to defend effort is in the 
minds of many to identify one's self with an unscientific 
psychology. Thus the educational house is divided 
against itself. In the midst of this confusion some 
are saying there is no truth, what seems so is illusion, 
and education is not a science. For us there is 
nothing left to do but to observe again that the 
child's mind develops itself through imitation, and 
through interest, and through effort. The truth is 
not in the part, but in the whole. This is the in- 
sight that will keep us from becoming warriors on the 
inside or sceptics on the outside of the educational 
house. From this point of view the difficulty of our 
discussion is in remanding each of these three agencies 
back to the sphere of its legitimate operation in the 
large field of mental development. 

And first, imitation. The discovery of the influence imitation, 
of imitation in individual and social development is 
modern. It could not be detected so long as men 
held only individualistic preconceptions of society. 
This discovery in our day of the wide-reaching 
influence of imitation in life is one of the effects, as 



of Imitation. 



176 The Philosophy of Education 

well as one of the causes, of our deeper social con- 
sciousness. The description of the influence of 
imitation in mental development is associated with 
the names of Tarde in France, and Baldwin and 
Royce in America. For the full discussion of the 
subject in its universal bearing, the reader must be 
referred to the works of these authors. ^ Here it must 
suffice for us to do only three things, viz., to define 
the nature of imitation, to indicate its larger effects 
in mental development, and to suggest some service- 
able educational uses of the principle. 
The Nature Imitation is the tendency of the individual to act 
upon the suggestions of others. In view of the social 
nature of the individual, the tendency is natural and 
instinctive. The imitation may be unconscious or 
conscious, even as the suggestion that is received may 
have been given consciously or unconsciously. When 
the pupil performs what the teacher asks, both the 
suggestion and the act are conscious. When the 
pupil's life is shaped by the teacher's character, 
the suggestion is doubtless unconscious, and the 
imitation may be conscious or unconscious. The 
suggestion is the tendency to act that accompanies 
the having of any idea, the suggestive quality being 
an invariable accompaniment of the occupation of 
consciousness by any idea whatsoever. " All con- 
sciousness is motor," ^ says Professor James. And 
the body, delicate machine that it is, registers in some 

^ Tarda, " Les Lois de I'lmitation"; Baldwin, "Mental Develop- 
ment," two volumes ; Royce, " Studies of Good and Evil," Essays VII, 
VIII. 

2 " Briefer Psychology," p. 370. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 177 

physical movement every idea that flits through con- 
sciousness. It is obvious that the suggestion upon 
which we act may be self-given, but only when it 
comes from others is the action imitation in the 
usual sense of the term. It is also evident that the 
suggestion received from another may be either what 
is said or what is done, may be precept or example. 

What does imitation do for the child in the way of The Effects 
mental development ? Of course imitation is always on^Menta°^ 
assisted by all the other developing agencies men- Deveiop- 
tioned above, and so no one of the effects now to be 
enumerated is wholly due to imitation alone. Among 
the more prominent mental effects in producing which 
imitation is a main factor may be included the power 
of speech, voluntary movements, self-consciousness, 
originality, and morality and religion. Imitation be- 
gins to work near the beginning of the ninth month,^ 
is at the maximum of its influence during the early 
years, and continues its effect throughout life, though 
diminishing in the amount of its influence as individu- 
ality and maturity are reached. '' When the imitative 
impulse does come, it comes in earnest. For many 
months after its rise it may be called, perhaps, the 
controlling impulse, apart from the ordinary life pro- 
cesses. As a phenomenon it is too famihar to need 
description. Its importance in the growth of the 
child's mind is largely in connection with the devel- 
opment of language and of voluntary movement 
generally." ^ 

1 Baldwin, " Mental Development, Methods and Processes," second 
edition, p. 131. 

2 /did,, p. 132. 

N 



1 78 The Philosophy of Education 



Imitation 
and Self- 
conscious- 
ness. 



Imitation 
and Origi- 
nality. 



The phenomenon of self-consciousness is largely- 
due to the influence of imitation. Because the eyes 
and the deeds of its parents and others centre so 
much in the child, its consciousness in imitation of 
them is directed to itself. The consciousness of self 
would never be sharpened except in society. As 
Professor Royce expresses it : " The early intellectual 
life of the child is lost to us in obscurity, despite 
numerous recent observations. But we are sure that 
the infant, in the first months of life, has nothing that 
we should call self-consciousness. The first clear evi- 
dence that we get of the presence of a form of self- 
consciousness intelligible to us comes when the infant 
begins to be observantly imitative of the acts, and later 
of the words, of the people about it. In other words, 
the first ego of the child's intelligible consciousness 
appears to be, in its own mind, set over against a 
non-ego that, to the child, is made up of the perceived 
fascinating, and, to its feeling, more or less significant, 
deeds of the persons in its environment." ^ This rec- 
ognition of one's self through the prior recognition 
of one's fellows will help us presently in considering 
imitation and morality. 

After perceiving that self-consciousness is largely 
due to the processes of imitation, it will not be so 
difficult to see that even originality, contrary to one's 
natural first thought, becomes possible through imita- 
tion. To be original is to be something more than a 
mere imitator. It is to add something characteristic 
to one's copy ; it is even to be selective of the copy 
that one will imitate. Once imitation has brought us 

1 " Studies of Good and Evil," p. 182. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 179 

to self-consciousness, then our choices will show and 
develop our originality. Here are conscious processes 
at work showing the uniqueness of our individuality. 
Through bringing us to consciousness of ourselves, 
imitation makes our originality possible. 

But in two other ways still imitation indicates 
originality. There are selective responses to copies 
that are unconsciously made, and every response to a 
copy that is not parrot-like and insignificant for mental 
development is characteristic. The child does not 
imitate all the acts of every person that he observes. 
Many of them slip by him without making sufficient 
appeal to him to lead to imitation. He does not 
respond to them because they do not appeal to him. 
His rejection is not conscious ; it is natural. But such 
natural rejections of certain copies declare his indi- 
viduality and strengthen it. And, also, in the second 
place, it must be observed that those suggestions that 
do appeal to the child, soliciting imitative responses 
from him, are transmuted by his own individuality. 
He copies characteristically. Just as in the old copy- 
books for teaching penmanship, many pupils may be 
imitating the same copy, but no two copies of the 
copy are exactly alike, so every child declares his 
own originality in the way in which he imitates. 
" Very rarely do we find a literal repetition of what 
is offered. Even from the beginning there is a ten- 
dency to depart a little from the copy — to adapt it 
somewhat to the special circumstances and tastes of 
the individual ; so that the replica always has a turn 
in it that the original did not have." ^ 

1 Stratton, " Experimental Psychology and Culture," p. 224. 



i8o The Philosophy of Education 

Because imitation gives the child a self-conscious- 
ness which permits him to choose the kind of indi- 
vidual he will be, because he shows and strengthens 
his individuality by the unconscious selections and 
rejections which his nature makes, and because he 
is original even in the fashion of his imitation, we 
must recognize the polar relation in which imitation 
and originality stand to each other. " So that imita- 
tion is, after all, but one side of the mental process. 
The other side is origination, which is quite as real 
and demonstrable as imitation itself. Imitation is a 
mere schoolmaster to bring us to originality. The 
child, through imitating others, becomes aware of his 
own capacity for a wide variety of acts that he other- 
wise would have believed were beyond his powers; 
he finds that he is able to do what others do. In 
this way, his own strength and skill and versatility 
are not only cultivated, but are revealed to himself. 
Imitation, then, even when we slavishly copy the 
acts of those near us, is all the while teaching us our 
own capacity." ^ 
Imitation The last of the effects of imitation on mental de- 

andReuSorf vclopment important for our present consideration 
has to do with morality and religion. Morality is the 
recognition in conduct of the rights of other persons. 
Religion is the recognition in life of the rights of the 
Ideal Person. Since the imitation of other persons 
brings one to a consciousness of self, as indicated 
above, it is evident that self-consciousness and the 
moral consciousness are a twin-birth. In the words 
of Baldwin : " The ego and the alter are thus born 

1 Stratton, " Experimental Psychology and Culture," p. 222. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education i8i 

together. Both are crude and unreflective, largely- 
organic, an aggregate of sensations, prime among 
which are efforts, pushes, strains, physical pleasures 
and pains. And the two get purified and clarified 
together by the twofold reaction between project and 
subject, and between subject and eject. My sense 
of myself grows by imitation of you, and my sense 
of yourself grows in terms of my sense of myself. 
Both ego and alter are thus essentially social ; each 
is a sociuSy and each is an imitative creation." ^ 

This fundamental sense of the unity of human 
nature in all individuals is the basis of morality. To 
the child's consciousness this is not a reflective, but 
an experienced, truth. What his fellows approve is 
to him the right, what they disapprove is the wrong. 
As Dr. Gordy puts it, " From this it follows that the 
beliefs of the very young as to what is true, fitting, 
right, noble, beautiful, desirable — apart from objects, 
which are desired because they satisfy the needs of 
the animal nature — mtLst be the opinions of those 
by whom they are surrounded : there can be nothing 
else." 2 

It is to be observed here, that when the copies are 
bad, imitation works in the interest of immorality 
quite as readily as in the interest of morality when 
the copies are good. If there is no worthy model to 
offset the suggestion of the unworthy, the imitation 
is also inevitably of the unworthy. As the Apostle 
Paul long ago wrote to the Corinthians, evil com- 
panionships corrupt good morals. The bearing of 

1 Cited above, p. 338. 

2 « A Broader Elementary Education," p. 136. 



1 82 The Philosophy of Education 

this negative influence of imitation upon the educa- 
tional process, as well as the positive, will be pres- 
ently indicated, though indeed it is already evident. 

It is no less true in the realm of religion than in 
morality that development is through personal imita- 
tion of the superior spiritual attainment of another. 
We come in the first instance to consider that other 
as a superior personality because our fellows do ; 
then our imitation follows our respect. It takes a 
person to reveal personality, and an Ideal Person to 
reveal human personality completely to itself. To 
see one's own possibilities realized in another is to 
be attracted by that other, is to begin to imitate and 
become really like that other. "... whatever gain 
most of us make is by a kind of spiritual appropria- 
tion of what others have already attained. Through 
imitation the gains of one become a common posses- 
sion, without loss to him who first made the gain ; it 
is multiplied in those who avail themselves of it." ^ 
The Ideal Person, as conceived definitely by any 
mind, is the unity of all the perfect characteristics 
that one knows. This person may have been con- 
creted once in human history, as in Jesus, in which 
case the process of imitation, and so religious growth, 
can go on far easier than when the ideal remains 
impersonal. The Apostle Paul again had this imita- 
tive process of spiritual development clearly in mind 
when he wrote, " But we all, with unveiled face re- 
flecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are trans- 
formed into the same image from glory to glory, even 
as from the Lord the Spirit." 

^ Stratton, " Experimental Psychology and Culture," p. 219. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 183 

We have now seen the larger effects of imitation 
on mental development in certain cases of educational 
significance, particularly in leading to self-conscious- 
ness, originality, morality, and religion. Let it be 
said again now that imitation alone is not wholly 
responsible for these great achievements of the 
human self -active spirit, but it is largely contributory 
to them. It now remains to suggest certain uses that 
may be made of the principle of imitation in the 
educational praxis, and briefly, too, since our general 
inquiry is mainly theoretical. 

It is the business of education from the psychologi- The Educa- 
cal point of view to develop the minds of the young. 0° j^^t^^o^ 
In so far as imitation is one of the agencies of mental 
development, it is incumbent upon teachers and edu- 
cational directors everywhere who desire to utilize 
every means that nature affords in their work to put 
the best models of every kind before growing chil- 
dren. These models may be material or the more 
potent ones of personality. Among the right mate- Material 
rial models into contact with which the school should ^°^^^s. 
bring the child may be mentioned a beautiful play- 
ground, an architecturally good as well as serviceable 
school building, well-lighted corridors, broad stair- 
ways, carefully ordered schoolrooms, neat and clean 
texts, a reasonably high requirement of the quality of 
work done, and an atmosphere of agreeable and en- 
grossing occupation, to breathe which cultivates the 
sense both of the reality and the winsomeness of 
living. 

In particular, the use of the model in the teaching of 
art and music has found and justified its place. It is 



184 The Philosophy of Education 

just finding its place, also, and will justify it, in the 
teaching of literature and composition.^ As else- 
where imitation here will have its perfect fruit in an 
original, though disciplined, style. 

But since a person is more revealing and so more 
imitable to the forming mind than a material model, 
it is in the realm of personality and its influence that 
the principle of imitation has its highest educational 
service. Both the great common sense of mankind and 
the expert educational opinion have put central empha- 
sis on the personality of those who teach the young. 
Emerson wrote to his daughter in college, " It mat- 
ters little what your studies are, it all lies on who 
your teacher is." Similarly President Jordan is insist- 
ing upon ''constructive individuality" in the teacher 
as the greatest thing in education. This emphasis is 
not misplaced. It justifies itself whether we consider 
the work of the teacher from his own point of view 
or from the point of view of the pupil. The teacher's 
own success is nine-tenths dependent on his person- 
ality, his success to include such elements as the re- 
gard of his pupils, his lasting influence upon them, 
the estimation set upon him by the community in 
which he works and by his employers, and the oppor- 
tunities that come to him for wider service. " The 
teacher may possess most approved pedagogical de- 
vices, and be thoroughly master of the subject to be 
taught; but if at bottom he be bored by his work, 
nothing will quite prevent the child from being in- 
sensibly affected in the same way. And, on the 

1 See for such a text, Kavana and Beatty, " Composition and 
Rhetoric," New York, 1902. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 185 

other hand, it is due to the direct contagion of states 
of mind that the enthusiast, ill-equipped and clumsy 
though he may be, is often so successful in dealing 
with the young." ^ I cannot forbear to add to this 
fine statement the name of Pestalozzi in educational 
history as an illustration of its truth. 

From the point of view of the pupils the personal-, 
ity of the teacher is even more important and signifi- 
cant than in his own case, as they are many and he 
is one. In this connection it is to be remembered 
that the most valuable elements in human life, moral- 
ity and religion, are largely the products of child- 
hood's imitation. The supplementary truth is also 
to be noted that these qualities of the human spirit 
cannot be taught ; they must grow. The school can- 
not omit them, for they are too important ; it cannot 
teach them, for they cannot be taught. Ethics can 
be taught, for it is the science of morality. The- 
ology can be taught, for it is the science of reli- 
gion. But morality and religion as dispositions of 
the heart and will can only be grown by the indi- 
vidual possessing them under the potent influence 
of suggestive patterns of righteousness and spiritual- 
ity. The quandary of the school as to how to culti- 
vate morality and reHgion without being able (in the 
nature of things, and not simply because of legal 
enactments against religious instruction) to teach 
them is solved through the provision of teachers 
with personalities worthy of imitation by the pupils. 
And the highest duty and privilege of the teacher is 
to be in whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, 

1 Stratton, " Experimental Psychology and Culture," p. 218. 



1 86 The Philosophy of Education 

lovely, and of good report what he is willing for his 
pupils to become. 
The Nature Personality is one of those elusive words whose 
of Personality, meaning Can always be felt, but hardly ever defined. 
Personality, as the French say of style, is the man. 
More definitely, it is the spirit that unifies the attain- 
ments of a man ; it is his attitude toward life, his point 
of view, his total character. All the great teachers 
of the race have had winning personalities. To 
take two illustrations, Socrates and Jesus. Plato, 
the greatest pupil of Socrates, puts his own best 
thoughts of most of his dialogues into the mouth 
of Socrates. It is the Socratic personality pervading 
the Platonic language. And the personality of Jesus, 
the Great Teacher, is still, and will never become less 
than, the dynamic centre of the Christian religion. 
That personality has put into the mouth of the ages 
the utterance of the demonstrative Peter, " Lord, to 
whom shall we go but unto thee, for thou hast the 
words of eternal life." 

It is a patent but not sufficiently remarked fact 
that the immorality and irreligion of a generation 
are not traceable to the school alone. This responsi- 
bility is to be shared with the central unit of society, the 
home ; with that great sophist of human society, pub- 
lic opinion ; with that great creature of society which 
ofttimes gives men law that is not justice, the state ; 
and with that indispensable, indeed inevitable, insti- 
tution of human life which ought to utter the voice 
of the ideal, the church. This fact is to be borne in 
mind in rightly estimating criticisms of educational 
results. Doubtless the American home, the very 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 187 

heart of society out of which are the issues of life, 
is falling further short of its moral and religious 
opportunity in the cultivation of youth than any 
other social institution. 

. Thus we have reviewed the nature of imitation, the Transition 
effects on mental development to which it conspicu- *° interest, 
ously contributes, and its educational uses. We now 
come to the consideration of that second wonderful 
word in our contemporary educational discussions, 
viz., interest, which, like imitation, is again one of 
many ways utilized by the self-active spirit of man 
in its own development. The transition from imita- 
tion to interest is easy. The child imitates that which 
interests him. What does not interest him, if left to 
himself, he leaves alone. Where interest is present, 
the educational machinery runs smoothly. Where it 
is absent, the dual problem arises of developing inter- 
est on the one hand or a will to follow the uninterest- 
ing on the other hand. This second phase of the 
problem will confront us presently when we come to 
the treatment of our third modern sacred word, viz., 
effort. 

Like imitation, the doctrine of interest has asso- TheAdvo- 
ciated itself with great names. It first won its perma- J^Jg^g°^ 
nent place in the education of Emile as provided by 
Rousseau, but, like everything else announced by 
this untrammelled being, his doctrine of interest 
stood unrelated to other limiting truths. Rousseau's 
vision was penetrating but unorganized. A Herbart 
was necessary to contribute to Rousseau's insight the 
pedagogy of interest. The followers of Herbart are 
many, both in Germany and America, and the doc- 



1 88 The Philosophy of Education 

trine of interest has received many additions and 
restatements. In America the theory has been 
naturaUzed, as the kindergarten also is in process of 
being, and prominent exponents of it, to mention only 
two, are Professor Dewey and Professor de Garmo. 

Like imitation also, interest in education is both 
an ideal and a practice of the present age. That 
education could be interesting and the schoolroom 
an attractive place was, until the eighteenth century, 
unthinkable. Dickens, in the nineteenth century, still 
had an audience that could appreciate Squeers. And 
Alexander Hamilton no doubt expressed the senti- 
ment of his contemporaries when he wrote, **The 
great problem of education is how to induce the pupil 
to go through with a course of exertion, in its result 
good and even agreeable, but immediately and in 
itself irksome." It mellows one's vision and gives 
a tinge of rose-color to one's outlook to be able to 
record that to-day the happy life may, and of right 
ought to, begin in the schoolroom. The emancipat- 
ing words of Rousseau in behalf of childhood are in 
process of fulfilment : " Emile has arrived at the end 
of the period of infancy [twelve years], has lived the 
life of a child, and has not bought his perfection at 
the cost of his happiness. On the contrary, they 
have lent each other mutual aid. While acquiring 
all the reason suited to his age, he has been as 
happy and as free as his constitution permitted him 
to be."i 

In considering interest as a means of self-develop- 
ment, we have to inquire concerning its nature, its 

1 "Emile," tr. Payne, the International Education Series, p. 128. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 189 

importance, and the art of securing it. Interest is The Nature 
not a form of knowledge, though knowledge may be °^ ^^^^rest. 
interesting ; neither is it a kind of action, though 
action too may be interesting. But interest is pri- 
marily a feeling. A feeling is an immediate experi- 
ence of consciousness, and the feeling of interest is 
an experience familiar enough to growing minds of 
whatever age. Every one knows that when he is 
interested something is proving attractive to him, is 
catching and holding the mind's attention, and that 
to this something it is no effort to attend. Because 
of the unity of consciousness, the feeling of interest 
is always attached to some object. This object may 
itself be something material, and usually is so in the 
cases of primitive man and childhood. Or it may be 
an idea, an act, or even another feehng. At this very 
moment perhaps we are interested in the feeling of 
interest. It thus appears that to be interested im- 
plies (i) a person who has the interest, (2) an object 
to which the interest may cling, and (3) an engaging 
quality of attractiveness about the object which cap- 
tures the feeling. Putting these things together, and 
realizing that the definition of any feeling is inappre- 
ciable to him who has never experienced it, we may say 
that interest is a pleasurable activity of the self. The 
object of the interest is that upon which the activity 
of the self impinges. 

Professor Dewey, having more prominently in mind 
the fact that the feeling of interest has an object than 
the absorbing quality of the feeling itself, thus defines 
it, " Feeling, so far as it is taken out of its isolation 
and put in relation to objects of knowledge or ideals 



.190 The Philosophy of Education 

of action, is interest T ^ Professor de Garmo, who has 
so entertainingly shown that interest is bound up with 
some form of self-expression, writes thus, " For a gen- 
uine interest is nothing but the feeling that accompa- 
nies this identification of the self through action with 
some object or idea." ^ And Herbart, who began the 
work of systematizing the theory of interest in its rela- 
tion to instruction, writes thus of its nature : '' Interest 
means in general that species of mental activity which 
instruction must create, but which has no place in 
mere knowledge. For we conceive of the latter as a 
store which the man may entirely dispense with, and 
yet be no other than with it. He who, on the con- 
trary, holds his knowledge firmly and seeks to extend 
it, is interested in it." ^ 

These words from the masters indicate that the 
conception of interest current among those who deny 
its fundajnental place as a mode of self-development 
is superficial and inadequate. Interest in education 
is not ease, it is effortless activity ; it is not a class- 
room vaudeville, with the teacher as chief performer, 
it is engrossing occupation ; it is not an amusing 
entertainment of the pupils, it is a joyous attainment 
by the pupils ; it is not play, it is attractive and com- 
pelling work ; it is not pursuing the line of least resist- 
ance, it is discovering the fine of greatest attraction. 
And the true opposite of interest is not hard work, 
but drudgery, not solid acijuisition, but wearying 

1 Psychology, p. 276. 

2 " Interest and Education," p. 27. 

3 Quoted in Felkin, " An Introduction to Herbart's Science and 
Practice of Education," p. 94. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 191 

monotony. Interest is the oil which lubricates the 
wheels of the class-room machinery. These con- 
siderations bring us in the next place to attempt to 
estimate the importance of interest in education. 

*' Interest is the greatest word in Education." The impor- 
These words of President Schurman stand on the title- interest 
page as the motto of Professor de Garmo's volume on 
Interest and Education. Though we might prefer 
to save this highest estimate for the third of the 
wonderful words in modern education, namely, effort, 
this pronouncement nevertheless forbids us to treat 
slightingly so real a matter. 

Interest is one of the great words in education, 
because it removes drudgery from the school, puts 
the motive power of the feelings at the disposition of 
the teacher, and is the immediate aim of all instruc- 
tion. Interest removes drudgery from the school, interest and 
As soon as an object of endeavor becomes interesting ^^ ^^^' 
in itself, like the learning of a lesson, like the recita- 
tion of a class, or the solving of a problem, this object 
becomes an end of action in itself. It is no 
longer done as a disagreeable means to an agree- 
able ultimate end. It is done for its own sake. 
The way has become attractive and worth while 
as well as the goal. The daily toil, as well as 
its final reward, receives the judgment of worth. 
This is the effect of interest in study. And this 
effect is also true, for, just as interest indicates, 
values do lie in the doing as well as in the deed. 
But the very essence of drudgery is the doing of 
what one does not like for the sake of something 
that one does like. " If the interest in the end alone 



192 The Philosophy of Education 

remains and no interest attaches to the means, then 
we have drudgery." ^ No wonder that so long as 
the school was thought of as a preparation for later 
real living, its tasks were also drudgery ; but now 
that the school has become a participation in present 
real living, its labors are also become meat and drink 
to young souls. The day of the emancipation of the 
individual from slavish work done in subjection to the 
will of another is at last also dawning in the school. 
Rousseau sounded the death-knell of feudalism in 
education, and Herbart made the interment. No 
doubt in those modern schools where the atmosphere 
of interest has supplanted that of ennui the pupils do 
those things which they ought to do quite as well as, 
if not better than, in any preceding schools of civili- 
zation. And they certainly leave undone the more, 
those things that ought not to be done. And these 
results are wrought, not through the old fear and au- 
thority, but through the new love and liberty. Pupils 
are nowadays doing what they ought to, more because 
they want to and less because they have to than in 
any period in the history of culture. 
The Motor Interest puts the motive power of the feelings at 

Feelings. the disposition of the teacher. It is an open question 
whether the feelings are not the greatest motive 
powers in life. No idea which the feelings fail to 
welcome can abide in the home of the mind. And no 
unchanging and uninteresting thing can remain the 
object of voluntary attention longer than a few seconds 
at the time. Without the enlisting of interest, ideas 
quickly fade away into nothingness and attention is 

1 De Garmo, " Interest and Education," p. 32. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 193 

intermittent. " Present interest is the grand motive 
power, the only one which leads with certainty to great 
results/' announces Rousseau.^ The educator who 
would instruct the intellect and fashion the will must 
also win the feehngs. Of course interest is but one of 
the many feelings of possible service to the teacher. 

And the securing of interest in the subject is the Theimmedi- 
immediate aim of the work of instruction. The instruction. 
remote aim varies with circumstances ; it may be 
the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake or 
for utility ; it may be the formation of character ; 
it may be the cultivation of the aesthetic sense ; it 
may be social efficiency, or the comprehensive aim 
of complete living. But in any case it is the 
immediate business of instruction, in justice to its 
opportunity, to develop an interest in the subject 
taught as the most efficient means to its remote 
end. The teacher who has solved the present 
problem of interesting his class in the subject- 
matter has solved the larger problem of instruc- 
tion. The possession of truth is preconditioned by 
its warm pursuit. 

One of the Herbartians, Dr. R. Staude, has stated 
the relation of interest to instruction in the following 
way, " Interest is the Hght with which Herbart has 
once for all illumined with the brightness of day the 
dark and mysterious ways of the art of teaching ; it 
is the magic word which alone gives instruction the 
power to call out the minds of the young and make 
them serve the master's aims ; it is the long lever of 
education which, moved easily and gladly by the 

1 op. cit.^ p. 82. 
o 



194 The Philosophy of Education 

teacher, can alone bring the will of the young into 
the desired direction and activity." ^ 

The discussion of the importance of interest as the 
immediate aim of instruction shall close with the fol- 
lowing words from American authors : " The prob- 
lem of teaching an intelligent savage some technical 
scientific matter would not be chiefly a problem of 
how to give him sensations regarding it, nor how to 
give him mental capacity enough to understand it, 
but how to arouse his interest in such a way that he 
would set his mind to work upon it. Interest is, there- 
fore, as much a necessary source of knowledge as is 
sensation. Sensations might have all the objective 
qualities that they now possess, and yet if they failed to 
interest, the mind would pass them over and they would 
never enter into the structure of our knowledge." ^ 
The Art of This significance of interest in the work of in- 

securmg structiou brings us to our next question, viz., the art 
of securing it. If interest is the immediate aim of 
instruction, how can it be gotten } This is one of 
those practical questions that from time to time have 
wedged themselves into our general theoretical in- 
quiry, and whose answers involve for their execution 
not so much insight on the part of teachers as a cer- 
tain art and skill. 

In brief, it may be suggested that interest begets 
interest, that interest accompanies natural mental 
growth, that interest is felt in any unified variety, and 
that interest appears in the novel that is similar to the 
familiar. 

^ Quoted by Felkin, op. cit., p. 102. 

2 McLellan and Dewey, "Applied Psychology," p. l8. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 195 

Interest begets interest. There is nothing so con- Aninter- 
tagious as a feeling. Given a teacher himself brim- teacher 
ming with interest in the subject taught for its own 
sake and for the pupil's sake, and that is a rare and 
frigid class indeed that will not thaw under his genial 
influence. 

Interest accompanies natural mental growth. A An Ordered 
pupil whose intellectual capacity is, on the one hand, <^""^icuium. 
insulted by the elementariness, or, on the other, over- 
whelmed by the advanced character, of the subject 
taught or of the method of its presentation, cannot 
be expected to follow the work with interest. There 
must be an adjustment of matter and method to the 
mind of the pupil. Interests, like instincts, ripen and 
decay. Let the educator take the tide of the pupil's 
interest when it is at the flood. The ordered cur- 
riculum and the growing mind must be well met at 
every point. 

Interest is felt in any unified variety. This sugges- Unity in 
tion applies to the character of the text-books selected, ^"®*^* 
and to the method of the class room. Variety alone 
is distracting ; unity alone is tiresome. The text-book, 
and the method of teaching, must go on an errand. 
There must be movement and there must be purpose. 
The bane of texts is lack of unity ; of method is lack 
of variety. The secret of interesting, as of aestheti- 
cally pleasing, the mind is to present it with a variety 
in unity. 

And also, interest is felt in the novel that is similar The New 
to the familiar. The novel that is unintelligible is and the Old. 
simply curious; the familiar has become common- 
place ; but the novel that is intelligible through like- 



196 The Philosophy of Education 

ness to the familiar, solicits investigation and interest. 
Knowledge is the basis of interest, — one is interested 
in that concerning which he knows something, and 
wants to know more. The pupils know something. 
Recognize this, and present the new material so that 
it makes connection with what is already in the mind 
of the class. Their expression will interest where the 
teacher's impression will fail. They are already in- 
terested in some things. Discover these, and present 
the new subject as an extension of old interests. The 
teacher is like the householder who brings forth 
things both new and old ; the old is what his pupils 
know, and are already interested in ; the new is what 
he wants them to learn. This is, of course, the Her- 
bartian doctrine of "apperception." That teacher is 
interesting who can make new things seem old, and 
old things new. The secret of it is making the pupil 
the centre of interpretation. Teach out from him in 
all directions. He will be interested in the world, or 
any part of the fulness thereof, if he can only see it 
as his. To make the subject reflect the self of the 
student, that is the very essence of securing interest. 
A quotation from Professor James on any subject 
which his brilliant pen has touched is always in order. 
Considering how interest is acquired, he writes : 
*' From all these facts there emerges a very simple 
abstract programme for the teacher to follow in keep- 
ing the attention of the child : Begin with the line of 
his native interests, and offer him objects that have 
some immediate connection with these. . . . Next, 
step by step, connect with these first objects and ex- 
periences the later objects and ideas which you wish 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 197 

to instil. Associate the new with the old in some 
natural and telling way, so that the interest, being 
shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the 
entire system of objects of thought." ^ 

An object of thought that is, or has become, in- Herbart's 
teresting in itself receives the involuntary attention of SrRektion 
the pupil. He attends because he likes to attend, of interest 
easily and without effort. There are those who, cap- 
tivated by the doctrine of interest and feeling the 
spell of their master, Herbart, eloquently declare, that 
interest is the only avenue to attention, that the pres- 
ence of compelling ideas is the only condition upon 
which the will can act, that the will is subject to "a 
circle of thought." In the words of one of these 
enthusiastic champions of the bondage of will to in- 
terest, " since study depends on the will, how is the 
will to be reached .'' By the power of apperceptive 
interest, he [Herbart] replies. Through apperceptive 
interest, Herbart, as we have seen, appeals directly to 
the will, and draws it without constraint, by the gentle 
attraction of assimilated knowledge, into the service 
of instruction. It is this, his interpretation of the 
principle [of interest], which may without exaggera- 
tion be called a great discovery, one which, as it be- 
comes more widely known and understood, will tend 
to mould all true education in the future." ^ 

After the preceding discussion of interest no one The Truth 
perhaps will say that I am unmindful of its place 
in education. Only I would say that its place is 
along with other important things, like imitation and 

1 "Talks to Teachers," pp. 95-96. 

2 Felkin, op. cit., p. loi. 



is in the 
Whole. 



198 The Philosophy of Education 

effort, and not in their stead. Neither am I, on the 
other hand, though preparing a way for the considera- 
tion of effort in education, among that small strenuous 
number who fear that the advent of interest in educa- 
tion is synonymous with a reign of weakness. Rather 
is my position, in idea at least, that each one of these 
three great modern educational words contains and 
conveys a needed message in our day, that the truth 
which we seek is in the unity of the conflicting 
opinions. Come we then to the consideration of the 
third of the ways in which the self-active spirit of 
man realizes itself, to that most significant of all per- 
sonal words, viz., effort. 

Let the teacher do what he will to interest the class 
in the subject, at times his powers will fail, his words 
return unto him void, and his class stare at him 
vacantly without " speculation in their eyes." In such 
barren and waste places in the work of the class room, 
nothing but " a slow dead heave of the will " from 
teacher and pupils alike can carry us safely over into 
the inviting fields beyond. Howsoever winning the 
work of recitation, at times in his private preparation 
the tide of the pupil's interest will be on the ebb. In 
that hour of trial only a vigorous will capable of pur- 
suing the uninteresting, though important, task will 
prevent the pupil from being beached on the shore 
of inactivity and idleness. At that moment when in- 
terest fails but attention continues we have effort. 
And at any moment when the right thing to do is not 
the most interesting there is the opportunity for effort ; 
there, also, is a moral situation, full often of tragic 
import. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 199 

It is pertinent to inquire at this point whether the The Free- 
effort put forth by the individual at a given time is a ^st?on^ed°" 
variable in amount, subject only to the mind's initia- 
tive in disposing of the physical energy at hand, or a 
fixed quantity and determined absolutely by the sum 
total of the conditions. To maintain the former is to 
be a libertarian ; to defend the latter is to be a deter- 
minist. Though the inquiry is pertinent here, its full 
discussion is not possible on psychological, but only 
on metaphysical, grounds. As such, we must reserve 
this question for our final chapter. 

But the phenomenon of effort, or the voluntary 
attention to the uninteresting, is the same psychologi- 
cally, whatever be the metaphysical interpretation of 
its significance. There can be little question as to 
what introspection reports concerning the mental 
state of doing an unattractive, though valuable, task. 
Concerning the phenomenon of effort, then, as the 
last of the three ways utilized by the self-active spirit 
of man in its own realization, let us inquire as to its 
nature, its importance, and its place in education. 

Effort is the strain consciousness puts upon itself The Nature 
in performing unattractive work. It is voluntary ° °^*' 
attention to the uninteresting. It is the will to do 
one's duty when one doesn't want to. It is listening 
to the still small voice of conscience instead of the 
whirlwinds of passion. It is overcoming inertia, act- 
ing in the line of greatest resistance. In the language 
of Professor James, who has more eloquently pro- 
pounded the ultimate worth of effort than any other 
psychologist : " Now our spontaneous way of conceiv- 
ing the effort, under all these circumstances, is as an 



200 The Philosophy of Education 

active force adding its strength to that of the motives 
which ultimately prevail. . . . The ideal impulse ap- 
pears, in comparison with this [propensity], a still 
small voice which must be artificially reinforced to 
prevail. Effort is what reinforces it, making things 
seem as if, while the force of propensity were essen- 
tially a fixed quantity, the ideal force might be of 
various amount. ... It [the effort] appears adven- 
titious and indeterminate in advance. We can make 
more or less as we please, and //"we make enough we 
can convert the greatest mental resistance into the 
least." ^ Professor James thus interprets the phe- 
nomenon of effort from the libertarian point of view 
as defined above. 

Effort does not simply mean that through it more 
of the same thing will be done ; it means also that 
through it a different thing is done. When alterna- 
tives of action are present and of unequal strength, it 
takes effort to follow the weaker. " True effort con- 
sists in reinforcing by additional ideas, desires, and 
motives, the side felt to be the weaker. It may be true 
that action follows the strongest desire, but it is also 
true that we have the power to call up considerations 
and feehngs that strengthen and that weaken the 
force of a desire." ^ 

The importance of effort grows out of its nature. 
Unless introspection is deceived in reporting the 
nature of effort, the pupil has the ability to reach 
the port of knowledge, even though the tide of in- 
terest fails ; and he has the ability to steer for the 

1 " Briefer Psychology," pp. 443-444. 

2 McLellan and Dewey, " Applied Psychology," p. 139. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 201 

haven of virtue, even though the winds and waves of 
impulse and appetite are boisterous and opposing. 
Out of the depths of the soul's struggles the jewels 
of knowledge and virtue are mined. Happy is that 
child of fortune whose duties and pleasures always 
coincide, but blessed is that son of toil who stops his 
ears from hearing the sirens' song as he sails by the 
enchanted isle of pleasure on the homeward way. 
The originality and bare significance of the individual 
soul appears in what it can do through effort as in 
nothing else. Sir Fowell Buxton is quoted as say- 
ing : " The longer I live, the more I am certain that 
the great difference between men — between the 
feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignifi- 
cant — is energy^ invincible determination^ a purpose 
once fixed, and then, death or victory ! That quality 
will do anything that can be done in this world ; and 
no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities, will 
make a two-legged creature a man without it." But 
to Carlyle must we go for the true gospel of effort. 
" Sweat of the brow, and up from that to sweat of 
the brain; sweat of the heart, up to that 'agony of 
bloody sweat,' which all men have called divine! Oh, 
brother . . . this is the noblest thing yet discovered 
under God's sky." 

What can the schoolroom do to cultivate so impor- How to 
tant a mental power.? As heretofore, our practical Effoit^*^ 
paragraphs must be brief. 

/Teachers strive to awaken ultimate and remote Awaken 
interests whose satisfaction demands long and labori- j^Jerests. 
ous pursuit, as well as immediate and present inter- 
ests whose satisfaction is easy. To discover to a 



202 The Philosophy of Education 



Form the 
Habit of 
doing the 
Disagree- 
able. 



student his life-needs and interests, that is a prize 
worth the best endeavor of a teacher. Really to suc- 
ceed in doing so is enough to induce the student to 
undertake whatsoever disagreeable means are neces- 
sary to reach that esteemed end. Of course this sug- 
gestion presupposes a certain maturity on the part of 
the student, at least that the pre-adolescent age of 
many and superficial interests is passed. It will be 
observed how the principle of interest, though one 
degree removed, still guides us in the cultivation of 
effort To appeal to ultimate, not present, interests 
is to cultivate effort. This is very different from 
being interesting as a teacher. 

Pupils should be taught that the strongest strength 
is developed by doing what they do not like to do. 
In fact, not to want to do a given thing, not in itself 
bad, is itself a good reason for sometimes doing it 
As Professor James writes in his famous chapter 
on Habit, which President Faunce says has been 
preached from a thousand pulpits : ^^ Keep the faculty 
of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every 
day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in 
little unnecessary points, do every day or two some- 
thing for no other reason than that you would rather 
not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws 
nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to 
stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the 
insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. 
The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly 
may never bring him a return. But if the fire does 
come, his having paid it will be his salvation from 
ruin. So with the man who has daily inured him- 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 203 

self to habits of concentrated attention, energetic 
volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He 
will stand like a tower when everything rocks around 
him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed 
hke chaff in the blast." ^ 

Teachers and pupils must understand the nature TheExer- 
of concentrated attention through effort. Voluntary "^^°^.^°^" 
attention given to an uninteresting subject can be Attention. 
sustained only a little while at a time, at most a few 
minutes; if the subject does not change, at most 
a few seconds. Under such circumstances work can 
be done only by continually bringing back the atten- 
tion to the subject in hand. Concentrated attention 
to an unattractive task is not attention that does 
not wander, but attention that does not get lost. 
Concentrated attention through effort is like a se- 
rial story, not continuous but continued. " And 
the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wander- 
ing attention over and over again is the very root 
of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos 
sui if he have it not. An education which should 
improve this faculty would be the education par 
excellence y 

As already intimated, so far from opposing each TheMutu- 
other, effort and interest really offer each other eJ^^LcI 
mutual support in education. Immediate interest interest, 
must hold sway with all young pupils before the 
powers of voluntary attention are developed. Imme- 
diate interest must still hold sway, even with older 
pupils, where it can be commanded. It does not 
make them idle; it makes them work. Nor is it 

1 "Principles of Psychology," Vol. I, pp. 126-127. 



ao4 The Philosophy of Education 

necessary for teachers to be intentionally less inter- 
esting than they can for the sake of providing unat- 
tractive difficulties for pupils to thrive upon. Be as 
interesting as our genius or our effort permits, the 
school will still be a training-ground of voluntary at- 
tention to unattractive tasks. The difficulties whose 
mastery develops strength are not the unnatural ones 
provided on purpose by the teacher, but the natural 
ones of the developing subject and curriculum, as in 
climbing a mountain the natural ascent is difficulty 
enough without unnecessary stones being placed 
in the path before us. However, when interest has 
done its best, effort has still to do its part. The ex- 
tremity of interest is the opportunity of effort. They 
stand to each other as love to law. Love is the ful- 
filHng of the law, and where love is, there is liberty ; 
but if love fails through human imperfection, the law 
is still there behind us, urging us on to our duty. So 
when interest is present, it is enough; but when it 
fails, as it sometimes will in the best schoolroom or 
in the best life, the capacity of effort is still there 
to carry the burden. The breezes of interest filling 
our sails may die away into nothingness, and then 
only the strong oar of effort can bring in the boat. 
Neither must we omit to observe that the begin- 
nings, as well as the middle stages, of growth of a 
subject, have their pecuHar difficulties, when interest 
is hard to develop. The new subject will not quickly 
make its connections with the old subjects or with 
life. Here a little effort in the mastery of elemen- 
tary and technical details will quickly lay a founda- 
tion for real knowledge of and interest in the subject. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 205 

The effort needed to conquer " the agony of starting " 
is like the little sturdy tug-boat that tows the big vessel 
out of the harbor into the open sea, where it can go of 
its own momentum. Effort thus leads to interest. 

Almost have we limited the conception of effort to A Larger 
mastering difficulties, to voluntarily attending to the Q^g^ort^^'^ 
uninteresting. This is true in a narrow sense of the 
term, but would be incorrect as our final word. Effort 
may be a large as well as a difficult activity of the 
self. The little tug is noisy and puffing ; we say it is 
making an effort. The large vessel under full head- 
way glides easily; it would be incorrect to say no 
effort is being made. The effort is concealed in the 
largeness and the ease of the motion, but great energy 
is being expended nevertheless. Just so a great and 
compelling interest may solicit from us all our active 
power, though quietly and easily. Thus interest calls 
out effort, in a large sense of the term. Professor 
de Garmo has this view of the matter in mind when 
he writes : " Effort is really the process of trying to 
realize an end through work. Desire is the tendency 
of the energies to push on to accomplish the object 
of effort. Effort, therefore, is really an evidence of 
desire. These two things, effort and desire, are con- 
sequently only two aspects of one thing, two phases 
of self-repression, when the end to be attained and 
the means for reaching it are separate." ^ Our words 
about effort have intended to add to this conception, 
not to take from it. Effort is the servant of interest, 
as the Herbartians say, as the law is the servant of 
love. But effort is also the master of interest when 

1 " Interest and Education," p. 37. 



2o6 The Philosophy of Education 

interest is unable either to start a new process or to keep 
it going, as he who is not under love is still under law. 

And our last word about effort and interest shall 
be this : it is only when they help each other that our 
work approaches perfection. To be interested with- 
out effort is to be entertained, to float with the current ; 
to exert effort without interest is to be wearied, to row 
against the current ; but to be interested with effort 
is to enjoy what is being accomplished, is to be steer- 
ing for my destination while the current favors my 
progress. Interest with effort introduces the element 
of play into man's work, when his efficiency is at a 
maximum. Our work is never done best until it is 
done easily. 

And herewith is ended our discussion of those three 
chosen ways, imitation, interest, and effort, whereby 
man's complete self-realization is attained. The un- 
derlying conception of self-activity as well as its 
special manifestation in mental effort are contribu- 
tions of the old rational psychology to our discussion ; 
the conceptions of imitation and interest are from the 
modern genetic psychology. The phenomena of edu- 
cation demand for their interpretation all the varying 
psychological insights. 

Having seen the nature of that activity of the self 
in its typical manifestations whereby self-expression 
is secured, we have next to raise the inquiry concern- 
ing the nature of that self-development which is the 
consequence of self -activity. This is our second gen- 
eral question of the psychological aspect of education. 
To answer it, we must again call upon the results of 
both the genetic and the rational psychology, and to 
this answer we now turn. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT OF EDUCATION 

{concluded') 

What is the nature of that self-development which The Notion 
self -activity secures ? There are three things to be ^l^f^' 
remarked concerning the nature of self-development, ment. 
viz., it presupposes time as its condition, it marks 
the transition from the potential to the actual, and it 
proceeds through successive stages of growth. Each 
of these implications of self-development must occupy 
us briefly. And first, the presupposition of time. 

In any development the element of time is neces- 
sary as its presupposition. Through time things 
grow from less to more. The abbreviation of time 
is the abbreviation of development. The stoppage ThePresup- 
of the educational processes before maturity is ^^^^^^^^ 
reached means arrested development. It is a con- 
spicuous fact that the time of mental immaturity for 
the human being is longer than that for any other 
creature. The physiological basis for this fact we 
have previously seen in discussing the significance of 
infancy. This fact it is, affording adequate time, 
that makes the greater education of the human mind 
possible. The period of youth, as well as the period 
of childhood, is greatly protracted in the human 
species. We may save time, if we will, by cutting 

207 



2o8 The Philosophy of Education 

short the years of youth in the school, but we are 
thereby losing education. Time is the condition of 
development, and generous nature indicates to edu- 
cators, by the periods of childhood and adolescence 
preceding maturity, the amount of time necessary 
for the development of a man. 
ThePoten- Secondly, in any development the potential be- 

theActuai.^^ comes actual. That which a developing thing is to 
become, it already is latently. Organisms, like plants 
and animals, grow by development from the inside 
out. Other things, like stones and mountains, change 
by accretion and attrition. As Aristotle, the fulfiller 
of the Platonic system, showed, the idea toward which 
the organism grows is already in the organism itself 
potentially. The ideal of a thing is the perfection 
of that thing, not the making of it into something 
else. A thing can become by development only 
what it is already in germ. The thistles do not 
grow grapes, nor the thorns figs. So in mental de- 
velopment, education simply brings out of the mind 
what was already in it. To aim at anything else is 
to get an artificial accretion or a parasitic growth. 
The young mind has within it already in latent form 
all the powers it can ever hope to reach by develop- 
ment. The school cannot send real men into society 
unless the home sends potential men into the school. 
Education can neither create nor endow, it can only 
develop. But develop it should, and not substitute 
any lower aim, like information, unless this word be 
used in its etymological meaning of shaping from 
within according to nature. The bane of the school 
has been the insistence upon uniformity of method 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 209 

and uniformity of product. This is not development 
but moulding. Men are not made after the fashion 
of the factory, but of the garden. The pupil must 
not be conformed to the wooden educational image, 
but transformed into the likeness of his true self. 
Education was the ancient Roman's method of 
bringing tip his child ; it is our method of bringing 
out the child. The lofty and legitimate psychological 
aim of education is to make of each pupil all it is 
possible for him to be. Development is the greatest 
word in the field of education. The idea of develop- 
ment is as basic in the school as justice is in the state 
and righteousness in the church. 

Thirdly, after the element of time and the realiza- 
tion of the potential, any self-development implies 
successive stages of growth. " First the blade, then The stages 
the ear, then the full corn in the ear." So in the «f Cental 

' Growth. 

development of the mental and moral human nature, 
first the child, then the youth, then the full powers 
of the man. These divisions of the developing life 
fall in with our common thought; they also have 
scientific bases. A few words concerning each of 
them. 

Childhood is better described as the first stage of 
mental development than as a definite period of 
years. A youth, a man, a race, may still be in The stage 
mental development Uke a child. To Hmit the term hlS^^'^" 
childhood to a precise period of years is dangerous, 
not simply because a given individual may remain a 
child beyond the limit assigned, but also because all 
individuals pass imperceptibly out of the stage of 
childhood. The essential thing about childhood is 



2IO The Philosophy of Education 

not its years but its characteristic point of view. 
However, these limitations need not deter us from 
striking averages and from saying for purposes of 
convenience that the usual period of childhood as a 
certain stage in mental growth covers about the first 
ten years of life. Educationally considered, child- 
hood belongs to the kindergarten and to the primary 
grades of the grammar school. It includes the ini- 
tial three years of infancy in the home. There is, 
of course, no special sanctity in the term childhood 
as covering this period, since usage is by no means 
fixed in the case. 

What, then, are the characteristics of childhood as 
thus designated .'* 

Intellectually considered, childhood represents the 
reign of the senses. Even while the baby is still 
weak and helpless, the nerves of the special senses 
The Intellect and their corresponding brain centres are consider- 
of the Child, g^^iy developed. Within a few days of birth the 
lower senses of touch, taste, and smell are operative, 
to be followed speedily by those of hearing, sight, 
and the muscles. The first problem before the 
child's mind is the coordination of sensations, to rec- 
ognize the seen thing as also the felt thing, and to 
reach successfully for the thing seen. This unifica- 
tion of sensations gives concrete objects of experience, 
things, the knowledge of which through a single sen- 
sation or more is perception. When sensations sym- 
bolize things, the child has developed the perceiving 
ability, and is on the highroad to success in the 
conquest of his world. The child is the true Berke- 
leyan, esse est percipi. The concrete thing is the 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 211 

object of his experience, and observation is his sole 
mode of mental acquisition. At about the age of 
three, through the muscular sensations, the organic 
feelings, and the double sensation of touch when in 
contact with a portion of its own body, the distinction 
arises in a vague way between himself and other 
things. This is the germ of later inner perception, 
as the knowledge of states of consciousness and 
self -consciousness. 

To sensation and perception, as powers of the mind 
in childhood, must be added the beginnings of mem- 
ory and imagination. To remember is not yet the 
easy delight it will be presently, however, and his 
imagination is of that playful kind which does not 
distinguish fact from fancy. The distinction of 
truth and falsehood arises later than the imagination, 
the bearing of which upon the exaggerated narrations 
to which children are prone is evident, as well as 
upon the question in casuistry concerning telling 
fairy stories to children. In the morning of life the 
rosy imagination illumines the world of the child 
before the white Hght of truth appears. 

Recognizing sense-perception as the characteristic 
intellectual activity of the child, resulting as it does 
in the knowledge of the concrete sensible things of 
experience, we may describe the point of view of 
childhood, intellectually considered, as the individu- 
a Using epoch of mental growth. 

But the feelings and the will, simple also though 
they are, must not be omitted from our account of 
childhood, though they by no means are subject to 
the same definite analysis as the intellectual functions. 



212 The Philosophy of Education 

The facts themselves are vaguer, more difficult of study, 
and also more neglected by child psychologists. 
The Feel- The feelings of a child are mainly those of pleas- 

^J^5m f^*^^ ure and displeasure. Between these two extremes he 

Child. ^ 

swings easily, the slightest thing being sufficient to elate 
or depress him. Out of these two primitive feelings 
many psychologists develop the whole array of man's 
emotional Hfe, ending in aesthetics. But the child 
also undoubtedly has those other Wundtian simple 
forms of feeling, viz., excitement and rest, tension and 
equilibrium. The organic, vital feeling of comfort and 
discomfort is continually present, the substratum of the 
sense of self. The pleasures and displeasures of the 
child are mainly, as would be expected, of sensational 
origin. Every sensation, in fact, comes with its gar- 
ment of feeling about it, — pleasurable, when within 
normal limits, displeasurable when either minimal or 
excessive in intensity. The sensations of movement, 
either random or, later, playful, are full of the most 
genuine pleasures to the child's life. Only the dis- 
pleasure of great weariness can inhibit the pleasure 
of the child's playing. Pain is a unique sensation in 
itself, not to be confused with the feeling of dis- 
pleasure. Pain, or any other sensation that becomes 
disagreeable through monotonous repetition or high 
and low intensities, excites the feeling of displeasure. 
The complex, coarser feelings which a child of ten 
may have make a long list, including such as joy and 
grief, love and hate, anger and fear, and pride and 
shame. These are called coarser feelings because 
their bodily accompaniments are strong. In origin 
they are rather instinctive than due to experience or 



the Child. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 213 

teaching. The aesthetic feeling is present as love 
of color. The feeling of wonder is early and very 
important as a spur to the child's inquiring habit of 
mind, often so unjustifiably vexatious to older persons. 
Very strong and quickly formed are the child's likes 
and dislikes, and in general they are determined by 
what ministers to or hinders his personal comfort. 
Sympathy is present as a feeling, it is evident, in the 
child, but it develops later than self-regard, and in 
general is in subjection thereto. Perhaps the feeling 
life of the child may be described as self-centred, which 
in itself forms one of the hard problems of social and 
moral education. 

The will of a child is unstable. He is largely sub- The wm of 
ject to impulse. The inhibitive powers are weak, 
the expressive powers strong. Ideas act themselves 
out quickly ; they do not tarry in consciousness long 
enough for contradictory suggestions to arise, which 
would lead to hesitation and deliberation. For the 
child, to think is to act. He is the best illustration 
of Bain's principle of " ideo-motor " action. His will 
is his ready and unthinking response to his upper- 
most ideas. The proverbial thoughtlessness of the 
child is the explanation of his explosive will. He 
follows his ideas instead of directing them. 

This impulsiveness of the child, which is the essen- 
tial characteristic of his will, is preceded in early life 
by random, reflex, and instinctive acts. The random 
movements of the limbs of an infant are signs of 
exuberant vitality, and conduce to muscular growth. 
The reflexes of the child are simple responses of the 
nervous system to mechanical stimuli, like withdrawing 



214 The Philosophy of Education 

the foot on its being tickled. The instinctive acts like 
creeping, standing, and walking are complex reflexes ; 
they are inherited nervous mechanisms that go off 
like alarm clocks at the right moment. The acts of 
children are mainly instinctive and imitative until the 
age of three. Then they begin to know what action 
is coming before it takes place, but with practically 
no ability to change or thwart it. This mode of 
action is impulsive, and properly characterizes the 
period of childhood. The great service of the earlier 
random, reflex, and instinctive acts is that they make 
possible, through the development of impulse, the 
later clearly chosen acts, which are the highest prod- 
ucts of will. Acts often repeated involuntarily leave 
in consciousness their corresponding sensations to 
represent them, the so-called '' kinaesthetic ideas," 
through the use of which consciousness later per- 
forms its chosen acts. 

The natural responsiveness and suggestibility of chil- 
dren indicate the extra importance of their having only 
right ideas from the beginning. Their moral educa- 
tion had better begin in this positive fashion than in 
the negative way of filling their minds with a multi- 
tude of things not to be done. To have these for- 
bidden things in mind is already to be doing them 
incipiently. Children have no wills to be broken; 
they have only ideas to be followed. Instead of blam- 
ing them for being wilful, their consciousness should be 
charged with the right idea. The moral education of 
the child consists in keeping his heart diligently from 
all evil and filling it abundantly with good treasure. 
This problem changes faces considerably when the 



of Youth. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 215 

inhibiting powers of youth are developed, as we shall 
see presently. 

Remembering all that was said above about arbi- The stage 
trary divisions in mental development, the gradual 
transitions from stage to stage, and the unequal rate 
of growth of different pupils, we may venture to assign 
to youth the period of years from about ten to about 
eighteen, covering the last years of the grammar 
school and the whole of the secondary school life. 
It includes the growth into and through the wonder- 
ful adolescent age when the great deep of human life 
begins to show its passion and its power. 

If, intellectually considered, childhood is the indi- 
vidualizing epoch, youth must be called the relating 
epoch. The things of the child have become the 
classes, the groups, the conceptions, — in short, the 
relations, of the youth. The sense-perception of 
the child has become the understanding of the youth. 
Not that the powers of childhood are destroyed ; they 
are only fulfilled. Childhood with all its promise 
and prophecy does not pass away ; it passes onward. 
Each later stage in mental development is but the 
blossoming of powers that were budding earlier. In 
a genuine mental growth nothing is lost ; the earlier 
stages are destroyed as such only to be preserved at 
a higher level. The youth still retains the things 
perceived as a child, but he understands them in 
their relations to other things ; his feelings still centre 
in self, but they reach out in fond attachments and 
friendship for others ; his will, too, is still responsive 
to ideas, only he takes more care as to which idea 
shall be uppermost. In general the youth is begin- 



2i6 The Philosophy of Education 

ning to appreciate the bearings of things ; he is also 
getting his own bearings in the great new world, of 
which he now feels himself consciously a part. It is 
the formative period of life par excellence. 
The Intel- To delay briefly on the intellectual, emotional, and 

lect of Youth. yQiitional aspects of youth: Intellectually, it is the 
time when memory, imagination, conception, and 
the understanding represent the mind's best powers. 
Memory retains and recalls the earlier impressions of 
sense. It is the great time for providing the mind 
with those essential facts of nature and history with- 
out which later culture is lacking in positive content. 
The imagination busily recombines the images of the 
past in new forms, and paints for itself a future all 
its own. It is the great time for the racial epics 
and storied experience. Conception grasps individ- 
uals in groups according to their similar relations, 
and introduces economy into mental life. It is the 
great time for the elementary classifications of natu- 
ral phenomena, and for providing the mind with those 
labels of life that give exactness and speed to deci- 
sion. And the understanding, the power of detect- 
ing resemblances and differences between individuals, 
brings things into mutual relations with each other, 
each after its own kind. It is the great time for ap- 
preciating those essential connections between phe- 
nomena without which nature is chaotic and human 
life fragmentary. The intellect of the youth, seek- 
ing relations, finds the world springing to meet it, 
bearing those relations in its very constitution. 

The case is not different with the feelings. It is 
the period in which the self finds itself in other selves. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 217 

Friendships are formed as lasting as life. The halo 
of romance illuminates the face of existence. Affec- 
tions, attachments, devotions, loyalties, have full 
sway. Particularly is it the time of aspiration ; the 
young life is seeking its source ; it has found its wings 
and would mount to the skies. The sensitiveness to 
the aesthetic is quick and becoming defined. Regard 
for personal appearance, susceptibility to decorum, 
consideration for the feelings of others, desire for 
social approval, all indicate that the emotions are giv- 
ing life some of its permanent hues. Not infrequently 
a seriousness comes over youth in view of the great 
real life beyond, like the clouds of spring. In brief, 
youth disengages all the strong feelings that later 
life shall temper and organize. Their centre has 
shifted from the self of the child to the other selves of 
the youth. Once again in natural manhood shall we 
see a shifting of the centre of the feelings. 

And now a word about the will of youth. The Thewm 
general transitional character of youth is also mani- ° °^* * 
fest here. Conduct is inconstant and variable. Re- 
liability is not yet estabHshed. Many interests ripen 
and decay. The youth is by anticipation a member 
of the various occupations in life in turn. Attention 
is solicited mainly by the things that interest rather 
than by the things that are important. The externals 
of study, like rewards, prizes, marks, and penalties, 
still have their attractiveness for the will. Present as 
against remote ends have predominating influence. 
The personality of the teacher is at the maximum of 
its influence. With all these survivals of childhood 
present, the youth is nevertheless pressing forward 



21 8 The Philosophy of Education 

into the region of self-mastery. The stirrings of new- 
physical life are like frisky unharnessed colts trying 
the powers of their owner. All the agencies are 
under way that will presently make the youth the 
man, but they are not coordinated and systematized. 
A great underlying, controlhng purpose has not yet 
organized the manifold impulses of youth into one 
grand whole. His will and its manifestations are 
like the runner who warms himself up with many 
movements for the race that is to come. The steadi- 
ness of strenuous activity is not yet. In summary 
we may say that the will of youth is in process of 
making sure of itself. 
The Stage The transition from youth to manhood is " where 

of Manhood, ^j^^ ^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^„ ^^^ ^^^^^ ^^ delightful 

promise empties itself into the river of service. Out 
of the ear grows the full corn. The blossoming of 
youth becomes the fruitage of maturity. This third 
period covers the work done by the colleges and the 
universities. 

The powers of conception are magnified in judg- 
ment and reasoning. Classifications yield up their 
unity. The sciences lead to philosophy. Things are 
seen, not in themselves, nor even in their relations 
simply, but in their totality. If, speaking intellectually, 
childhood is the individualizing, and youth the relat- 
ing, then manhood must be the unifying, epoch. 
The senses and the understanding find their fulfil- 
ment in the reason. The static and the dynamic cate- 
gories yield to the organic. The independence of the 
individual as revealed through sense-perception made 
way for the dependence of the individual as revealed 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 219 

by the understanding, only that both of these stages 
might complete themselves in the independence of 
the whole as revealed by the reason. In the admi- 
rable language of Dr. Harris : " The lowest thinking 
activity inventories things but neglects relations ; the 
middle stage of thinking inventories relations, forces, 
and processes, and sees things in their essences, but 
neglects self -relation or totality ; the highest stage of 
thinking knows that all independent being has the 
form of life or mind, and that the absolute is a per- 
son ; it studies all things to discern traces of the 
creative energy which is the form of the totality." ^ 

The feelings of the man have touched the high The Feelings 
point of their development in the sense of the beautiful 
and the sublime. Once the soul of man has felt the 
perfect, which is the enjoyment of beauty, and has 
felt its own exaltation through its kinship with the 
infinite forces even in the moment of its humiliation, 
which is the sense of the sublime, man's emotional 
life has incorporated that unity of reaUty which his 
reason has intuited. 

And the will of man is that disciplined activity Thewm 
which pursues purposes steadily, and realizes great 
ends. Self-control and self-direction are its char- 
acteristic qualities. Attention is voluntarily given to 
the uninteresting present task for the sake of the im- 
portant future accomplishment. The inclinations of 
heredity and the influences of environment are but 
helping or hindering forces in the will's masterful 
achievement of life's plan. 

We may omit here further details in description of 

^ Harris, " Psychologic Foundations of Education," pp. 36-37. 



220 The Philosophy of Education 

manhood as the final stage of mental growth, in view 
of that other question awaiting us presently concern- 
ing the characteristics of the educated mind. 

Thus we have reviewed those stages of mental growth 
which are implied in the notion of self-development. 
And herewith is completed our answer to the second 
general psychological question, viz., the nature of 
that self-development which is secured through self- 
activity. The nature of education, psychologically 
considered, is the realization of the self. The means 
of education is the activity of the self. It only 
remains to inquire concerning the characteristics of 
the educated self. Before passing, however, into the 
lofty air of this ideal region, we may pause a moment, 
as often heretofore, in the valley of the practical. 
These considerations we have had concerning the 
notions of self-activity and self-development indi- 
cate for us certain negative and positive things 
concerning educational practice. 

At least three things often associated with the con- 
ception of education are not truly representative of its 
nature. 

(i) Education is not a gift to be bestowed ; it is a 
trophy to be won. It is not the transmission of 
mental power from teacher to pupil ; it is making 
latent mental power in the pupil kinetic. It is not a 
divine gift of tongues from the teacher, but a human, 
hard-earned victory for the pupil. "The telling 
teacher is not the telling teacher." Education is not 
a jack-knife to be presented, it is an intellectual pil- 
grimage to be taken. The teacher is not the pupil's 
"pony," but his experienced travelling companion. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 221 

(2) Education is not receptivity, but activity; not Notimpres- 
impression, but expression ; not learning, but think- ^^°^* 

ing ; not knowledge, but power. In the matter of 
becoming educated, as elsewhere, it is more blessed 
to give than to receive. Pupils usually lose what the 
teacher gives them ; they usually keep what they 
give the teacher. The mind is developed not by 
receiving knowledge but by winning it ; not by having 
the beauties of the world catalogued for it but by dis- 
covering them under guidance; not by having the 
moral quality of every deed labelled upon it but by 
self-direction. Only at the risk of falling into the 
erroneous, the ugly, and the bad is the mind estab- 
lished in that which is true and beautiful and good. 

(3) Education is not primarily fitting a child to Not 

do something ; it is getting him to be something. It utilitarian, 
is not primarily utilitarian, but cultural. The notion 
of being is more comprehensive than the notion of 
doing ; one must be something in order to do 
something ; out of the fount of being flows the 
stream of achievement. It is as serviceable to 
learn to do by knowing as it is to learn to know by 
doing. The ideal of the liberal education is being ; 
of the technical education is doing. The former 
underlies the latter. There is no short-cut to real 
achievement ; the long route of personal development 
is the only one. One must travel the way of self- 
development, and behold in the way the visions of 
truth, before he can fully enter upon the self-devo- 
tions of life. 

We must distinguish in our thinking between what 
education is and what it is for, between its nature and 



222 The Philosophy of Education 

its end. Milton and Herbert Spencer have admira- 
bly defined for us the end of education, but we must 
go to Pestalozzi for a definition of its nature. Milton 
says, " I call a complete and generous education that 
which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and mag- 
nanimously all the offices, private and public, of both 
peace and war." Spencer's most famous statement 
is, " To prepare us for complete living is the function 
which education has to discharge." Pestalozzi touches 
the quick of the matter in his notable figure: 
" Sound education stands before me symbolized by a 
tree planted near fertilizing waters. A little seed 
which contains the design of the tree, its form and 
proportions, is placed in the soil. See how it ger- 
minates and expands into trunk, branches, leaves, 
flowers, and fruit. The whole tree is an uninterrupted 
chain of organic parts, the plan of which existed in its 
seed and root. Man is similar to the tree. In the new- 
born child are hidden those faculties which are to un- 
fold during life. The individual and separate organs 
of his being form themselves gradually into an har- 
monic whole, and build up humanity into the image 
of God." 
The Use of In Contrast with what education is not, the brief 
MentaT^^ ° survcy wc had of the stages of mental growth in 
Growth in self -development suggests unavoidably certain posi- 
ucaing. ^.^^ matters of which education should take account, 
(i) Education ought to help, and not to hinder, 
nature in the work of carrying the mind through its 
Adjust Sub- stages of growth. This the practice of education can 
trPmSi-r ^^ ^^ ^^^ ways. First, there ought to be an ad just- 
Mind, ment effected between the subject-matter of the cur- 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 223 

riculum and the stage of mental development of the 
pupil. Fairy-tales for the child, history for the youth, 
and philosophy for the man will illustrate. To attack 
a subject before the mind is ready for it is to do in- 
justice to the subject and injure the self-confidence 
of the mind ; it may also lead to over-development of 
the mind for its age. To come upon a subject after 
the mind has passed by the psychological moment of 
readiness for it, is to bring contempt upon the subject 
and insult the mind ; it may also lead to arrested men- 
tal development. " In all pedagogy the great thing 
is to strike the iron while hot, and to seize the wave 
of the pupil's interest in each successive subject before 
its ebb has come, so that knowledge may be got and 
a habit of skill acquired — a headway of interest, in 
short, secured, on which afterward the individual 
may float. There is a happy moment for fixing skill in 
drawing, for making boys collectors in natural history, 
and presently dissectors and botanists ; then for initi- 
ating them into the harmonies of mechanics and the 
wonders of physical and chemical law. Later, intro- 
spective psychology and the metaphysical and reli- 
gious mysteries take their turn ; and, last of all, the 
drama of human affairs and worldly wisdom in the 
widest sense of the term. ... To detect the mo- 
ment of instinctive readiness for the subject is, then, 
the first duty of every educator."^ This necessity of 
effecting a timely conjunction between the subject- 
matter and the pupil's mind is the basis for the 
" Culture Epochs " of the successors to Herbart. 
(2) There ought also to be a progress in method 

1 James, " Briefer Psychology," pp. 404-405. 



224 The Philosophy of Education 

stages of of instruction corresponding to the stages of mental 
Method. growth. ''When I was a child, I spake as a child, 
I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but 
when I became a man, I put away childish things." 
The methods of teaching men are not the methods 
of teaching youth or children. The method of teach- 
ing is the manner in which the subject-matter is pre- 
sented to the learning mind. In general, children 
must be taught by the method of illustration ; youth 
by the method of combination, that is, showing the 
connections that exist between different things or 
successive events; and men by the method of sys- 
tem, whereby unities, total points of view, and vision, 
are secured. Children must see, youth must under- 
stand, men must reason. There must be a happy 
conjunction between the method of the teacher and 
the capacity of the pupil. Only so can ''boyhood 
ripen in boys, youthhood in youth, and manhood in 
men." This suggestion was worked out in consider- 
able detail by Herbart himself in the so-called " For- 
mal Steps of Teaching." 
The Child (s) It is customary to assert that the stages of 

and the Race, cental growth in the child repeat those of the race. 
The " Culture Epoch " theory implies this. Biology 
suggests the same principle in the physical realm, on- 
togeny repeating phylogeny. The claims of psycho- 
physical parallelism are thus very neatly supported 
by the theories of mental and physical evolution. 
As usual, the poets have anticipated by intuition the 
observation of the scientists. 

" There is a history in all men's minds 
Figuring the nature of the times deceased." 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 225 

But it would seem after all that only in general does 
the child repeat the experience of the face. For an 
organism is the product of heredity and environment 
and "organic selection," that is, its own unique re- 
sponses to stimuli. This last element indicates a cer- 
tain amount of self-determination even in the physical 
organism. The environment is also a variable ele- 
ment in its influence, since from age to age its com- 
plexion is changed. Heredity itself, though the least 
variable perhaps of all the three elements that go to 
make an organism, is yet not constant in its transmis- 
sions. Whence it happens that it is quite possible 
for an individual child to begin somewhere short of 
the "tooth and claw" stage of primitive existence, 
even to omit some of the original epochs, to inherit 
mainly from a mediaeval instead of an ancient aeon, 
and to pass quickly by means of good home and kin- 
dergarten supervision into modern civilized childhood. 
Let teachers no longer feel under the necessity of re- 
garding children as little savages. Children they are, 
clad in the garments of ancestral possibility, with ani- 
mal fears and angers lurking in the recesses of their 
nervous systems, but also wrapped around with a 
human heritage too from more generations than can 
be numbered, and bearing in their bodies the insignia 
of noble rank and infinite dignity. Let the child not 
run wild because he is a potential animal, but train 
him up in the way he should go because he is a 
potential man. 

These considerations complete for the present our 
breathing-spell in the atmosphere of the practical. 

Having now seen the nature of that mental activity 
Q 



226 The Philosophy of Education 

The Charac- which leads to mental development, and the nature 
Educat^ed ^^ ^^ ^^^ notion of mental development as the psycho- 
Mind, logical result of education, it remains for us to answer 
our third question, and attempt to describe in some 
detail the characteristics of a developed mind. The 
answer to this question is both general and specific. 
The General In general the qualities of an educated mind are, as 
nswer. ^-^^ preceding discussions have fitted us to appreciate, 
the power to know, the power to feel, and the power 
to will. Education takes the natural forms of con- 
sciousness and raises them to greater efficiency. The 
educated man above others is possessed with truth as 
the outcome of his power to know, of beauty as the 
outcome of his power to feel, of goodness as the out- 
come of his power to will. It is an incomplete edu- 
cation that omits or neglects any one of these three. 
The power to know, when exercised, makes the schol- 
arly man; the power to feel, when exercised in the 
appreciation of the aesthetic in nature and the ideal 
in persons, makes the gentle and sympathetic man ; 
and the power to will, when exercised in its true direc- 
tion, makes the honorable man. The scholar, the 
gentleman, and, with our form of faith, we may add 
the Christian, are the natural psychological ideals of 
human education. 
Like begets Each of these phases of consciousness, viz., know- 
ing, feeling, and willing, is dominantly developed, it 
will be noticed, by that element in the spiritual envi- 
ronment which it itself in the history of the race sup- 
plied. Through sciences we learn to know, through 
arts to feel, through volitions to will. In things of 
the mind like is nourished by like. Because of the 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 227 

unity of the human mind, however, each division of 
the curriculum influences the whole mind as well as 
that phase of mind to which it particularly appeals; 
just as in the social achievement the whole mind as 
well as one of its functions was operative in produc- 
ing each distinctive product. The unity of mind in 
its three ultimate modes is like a single cord com- 
posed of three strands. In its action it is like the 
human body which as a whole does things while call- 
ing into play one part particularly. 

This is our general answer to the question as to the 
qualities which education develops in consciousness. 
The specific answer must take the form of an enu- 
meration in some detail of those particular and essen- 
tial traits which betoken the educated mind. 

(i) The doors of the mind are open. This means The open 
two things, viz., the senses are responsive to all the c°°sJious- 
stimuli of the world they are capable of receiving, ness. 
and the mind is ready to receive whatsoever things 
are true, lovely, and of good report. The senses are 
the only avenues of approach to the mind which the 
world has. These avenues, particularly those of sight, 
hearing, touch, and the muscles, should be unob- 
structed and usable. The senses are intended to 
report the data of knowledge, so far as they can, as 
it exists in nature. There is a great wealth of natural 
fact from which the unaided senses are excluded, 
such as the very minute, the very remote, the inter- 
mediate wave-motions between hearing and seeing, 
and the very high wave-motions, which makes it the 
more important that the senses of even the unscien- 
tific observer report well what they can report at all. 



228 The Philosophy of Education 

To-day most men are shut off from the pleasures the 
naturalist experiences in the woods because having 
eyes we see not, and having ears we hear not, and 
having minds we comprehend not the messages 
nature would be continually giving us. 

The term, the senses, has come also significantly 
to connote an intellectual quality, as when we say, 
" He came to his senses," meaning he regained con- 
sciousness, or his rational self-control. The best 
intellect is impossible without the best use of the 
senses. Without open senses, the mind cannot be 
open. 

The educated mind is open to receive, and welcome, 
and utilize, and enjoy the beauty of unadorned truth 
and the truth of simple beauty. A willingness to 
know, a readiness to listen, a desire to be convinced, 
an attitude of candor, an honesty of the intellect, — 
these things are wrought into the fibre of the devel- 
oped mind. That immorality of the intellect which 
withholds, distorts, minimizes, or refuses to acknowl- 
edge, the truth, is characteristic of unrounded minds, 
and is the greatest impediment to progressive thought. 
The action of the immoral intellect is to be distin- 
guished from that of the wise teacher who has many 
things to tell his pupils when they can bear them. 
This is the necessary adjustment of truth to life to 
secure comprehension of the truth and uplift of the 
life. It is a test too severe for undeveloped minds to 
welcome personally disagreeable truth, and even the 
educated man must love God with all his mind before 
he is sufficiently humble to pass the test smilingly. 
To such a man the whole truth is dear ; he has faith 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 229 

in its capacity to stand alone without artificial sup- 
ports, such as the decrees of councils and the sayings 
of high officials. These things were said because 
they were true ; they were not true because they were 
said. The open mind is stifled in a closed system of 
truth ; as well exclude from the lungs the free winds 
of heaven ! Truth is the interpretation of life, and 
so truth is continually revealed as life progresses. 
The open mind, so far from staying the growth of 
truth, assists it on its saving way. 

(2) The treasure-house of the mind is well filled. Knowledge. 
When all is truly said against knowledge as the 
sufficient end of education, still it remains true that 

the educated man must know something and know 
it well. He cannot know everything, — the accumu- 
lated knowledge of the race is too vast and the rate 
of human learning too slow, even if encyclopaedic 
information were a desirable educational aim. But 
as the result of the activity of the intellectual aspect 
of consciousness, the educated man has a wide knowl- 
edge of the large and essential facts of men and 
things and exact knowledge of that field of fact 
wherein he proposes to devote his life. His knowl- 
edge is general enough to make the universe seem 
like home, and specific enough to make his work in 
the world a profit to others and a pleasure to himself. 
Without such knowledge, man's sympathies are 
contracted and his services slight. 

(3) Self-knowledge. The educated mind has Seif-knowi- 
become acquainted with itself. In its voyage of ^^^^' 
discovery round the world, it has found something 

of itself in everything, and has finally come to itself. 



230 The Philosophy of Education 

An educated man knows his strength and his weak- 
ness, and is content to work within his Hmitations. 
At some time during the educative process the 
searchlight of learning discovers to the student his 
special ability, and thereafter his capacity is his 
calling. Once for all his mind is awakened. Such 
a vision of his forte stabilizes his life by setting a 
solid end in view, to work toward which is not dreary 
drudgery but an invigorating pleasure, because it is 
self-expression. 

After describing many interests of youth that had 
their day and ceased to be, Professor Miinsterberg ^ 
reports in his own case that finally " the lightning 
struck" when he came to psychology. Of such a 
moment of self-knowledge. President Eliot writes : ^ 
" When the revelation of his own peculiar taste and 
capacity comes to a young man, let him reverently 
give it welcome, thank God, and take courage. 
Thereafter he knows his way to happy, enthusiastic 
work, and, God willing, to usefulness and success.'* 
In an unpublished educational address. President 
Tucker has said : " Education is the process whereby 
a man learns to find himself and to make sure of 
himself, that is, self-knowledge and self-reliance." 
The second quality here mentioned, viz., self-reliance, 
we have to mention later as another characteristic 
of the educated mind. 
Imagination. (4) Imagination. The sciences, the arts, and the 
volitions tend to call out the imaginative powers of 
consciousness. In science it is the imagination that 

1 Atlantic Monthly, May, 1900, Article, "School Reform." 

2 « Educational Reform," p. 12. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 231 

frames hypotheses for observation and experiment 
to verify. In his essay on the scientific uses of the 
imagination, Professor Tyndall writes : ^ " Bounded 
and conditioned by cooperant reason, imagination 
becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical 
discoverer. Newton's passage 'from a falling apple 
to a falling moon ' was a leap of the imagination. . . . 
In fact, without this power our knowledge of nature 
would be a mere tabulation of coexistences and 
sequences. We should still believe in the succession 
of day and night, of summer and winter; but the 
soul of force would be dislodged from our universe ; 
causal relations would disappear, and with them that 
science which is now binding the parts of nature to 
an organic whole." 

In the arts the imagination is stirred as the mind 
comes into sympathetic appreciation of the object 
of beauty. It was through the productive imagina- 
tion, recombining old elements in new forms, that 
the work of art was made. The builder, the sculp- 
tor, the painter, had in mind the image of their work 
before hand was laid to tool. The emotions supplied 
the heat, the glow, the impulse, the longing to pro- 
duce, to which the imagination gave definite form 
and direction. Perhaps the musician and the poet 
do not always so imagine their work in advance, but 
sit down with noble and uninterpreted emotions to 
express, to which the expression itself first gives 
shape and definiteness. 

And in the volitions, particularly in history, the 
imagination is called into play as the mind vividly 

1 " Half Hours with Modern Scientists," p. 250. 



232 The Philosophy of Education 

reproduces the stirring scenes and their settings 
from out the past. Without this imaginative reading, 
history is a record of dead things. With it, history 
lengthens our lives by thousands of years into the 
undying past. 

Since writing this account of the imagination as 
one of the essential characteristics of the educated 
mind. President Eliot has made his great address on 
** The New Definition of the Cultivated Man " before 
the National Education Association in Boston, in 
which, after stressing character, language, and the 
store of knowledge, he estimates the imagination as 
follows : " The only other element in cultivation 
which time will permit me to treat is the training of 
the constructive imagination. The imagination is the 
greatest of human powers, no matter in what field it 
works — in art, or literature, in mechanical invention, 
in science, government, commerce, or religion, and 
the training of the imagination is, therefore, far the 
most important part of education." He continues, 
" I use the term constructive imagination^ because 
that implies the creation or building of a new thing." 

With this conclusion I dissent, in favor of the 
training of the next mental power to be mentioned, 
viz., the judgment, and for the following reasons. 
Nature has endowed but a small fraction of the 
human race with the capacity to create. The Dantes, 
Goethes, Shakespeares, Darwins, and Pasteurs of the 
world are very rare. Such creative minds, further- 
more, have been and are mostly beyond the assistance 
of the school, though the school ought now to begin 
the attempt of discovering them to themselves. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 2^2 

Neither is it necessary for either the maintenance or 
the progress of human society that the mass of men 
be creators, as the past and present prove. On the 
other hand, nature has endowed a vast majority of the 
human race with the capacity, when developed, to 
judge safely and well. This natural sanity of mind 
the school can cultivate. And it is necessary for 
both the permanence and the progress of human 
society that a majority of its members be men of 
good judgment, not subject to every newly created 
theory, whether it be true or false, as both past and 
present abundantly prove. It is through the power 
of good judgment that the imagination is tempered 
in its flights, that worthy characters become the object 
of earnest endeavor, and that sanity is estabUshed as 
the order of human society. It is judgment that 
distinguishes the true from the false, the beautiful 
from the ugly, and the good from the evil. It must 
be then that the school, as the minister to both society 
and the individual, finds a less important function in 
the training of the imagination than in the training of 
the judgment. 

(5) Judgment. The educated man has a trained judgment, 
judgment. Judgment is the mind's power to com- 
prehend and estimate situations, whether facts or 
principles. It is the highest intellectual power. It 
is the power to think. It comes as the result of train- 
ing. The man of judgment is the man of intellectual 
power. It is the main characteristic of a liberal edu- 
cation received at Harvard fifty-eight years ago, in- 
dicated by Senator Hoar in the following words (and 
which to-day he finds lacking in a conspicuous degree) : 



234 The Philosophy of Education 

" There was something in the college training of 
that day, imperfect as were its instruments, and slender 
as were its resources, from which greater intellectual 
strength in the pupil was begotten, than there is in the 
college training of the present generation. I will not 
undertake to account for it, but I think it was due, 
in large part, to the personal quality of the instruc- 
tors. . . . The difference in the capacity of a college 
graduate to deal with any matter requiring intellectual 
power, and that of a man who had not got that edu- 
cation, was marked and unmistakable. I do not know 
how to account for or to reason about it, but Alma 
Mater brought up her boys to be better boys and 
to be better men, to serve the state better in war 
and in peace, to be better citizens and better sol- 
diers than could be found elsewhere." ^ 

What are the elements of a trained judgment ? 
{a) The ability to see the facts clearly and accurately 
whose sense data are reported. The mind is trained 
to interpret the sense data aright, {b) The trained 
judgment generalizes safely. Generalization is the 
power to unite facts in principles. The trained judg- 
ment waits until sufficient facts are in to make a safe 
statement about their meaning. It interprets aright. 
This is insight, {c) The trained judgment deduces 
validly. Having a general principle as the interpre- 
tation of the meaning of facts, it sees what follows 
from it ; it understands how to investigate and inter- 
pret these new facts. This gives a mastership of 
future experience. This is foresight, {d) The 
trained judgment appears in a certain consistency and 

"^ Scribner^s,}vXy, igoo. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 235 

connectedness present in mental products. The 
bearings of fact on fact, of principles on principles, 
of truth on truth, are recognized. The interrelation 
of the different parts of reality appears. Such judg- 
ing repeats mentally the systematic nature of things 
as they are ; such thinking is like a seamless robe. 
This absence of gaps, this presence of transitions, 
this vision of both sides at once, this perception of 
the systematic nature of truth, is the finest fruit of the 
trained judgment, as the trained judgment itself is 
the finest fruit of the trained mind. 

To summarize, the trained judgment reports facts 
as they are, sees their meaning, foresees their con- 
sequences, and glimpses the whole of which they are 
fragments. Judgment is the mind's assertion about 
reality; it reaches beyond the content of individual 
consciousness and lays hold of that which is object- 
ively true ; it is the typical act of intelligence in its 
effort to comprehend its world. 

The training of the judgment is unfortunately not 
so common a product of modern education as we 
could wish to see. Remembering the words of Sena- 
tor Hoar, let us note also the following criticism from 
Professor Faraday : " Let me next endeavor to point 
out what appears to me to be a great deficiency in 
the exercise of the mental powers in every direction : 
three words will express this great want, deficiency of 
judgment. I do not wish to make any startling asser- 
tion, but I know that in physical matters, multitudes 
are ready to draw conclusions who have little or no 
power of judgment in the cases ; that the same is 
true of other departments of knowledge ; and that, 



236 The Philosophy of Education 

generally, mankind is willing to leave the faculties 
which relate to judgment almost entirely uneducated, 
and their decisions at the mercy of ignorance, preposses- 
sions, the passions, or even accident. . . . I will simply 
express fny strong beliefs that that point of self -education 
which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires 
and inclinations^ until they are proved to be rights is 
the most important of all^ not only in thifigs of natural 
philosophy^ but in every depart7nent of daily lifeT^ 

(6) Taste. The mind's judgment on beauty is 
taste. Through taste the beautiful and the sublime 
in the works of man and God become objects of 
mental perception and enjoyment. Such pleasure is 
a pure gain, no sorrow is mingled therewith. Here 
the mind rests content in the perfect ; or else, in the 
presence of natural sublimity it rises trembling into 
the infinite. Through judgments on truth men are 
made observant ; on goodness, energetic ; on beauty, 
appreciative. The finer, higher, and more delicate 
things of human experience come into consciousness 
through the aesthetic sense. To omit it is to be intel- 
lectually cold or morally austere or both ; to possess 
it is to walk in the more excellent way of sympathetic 
communion with the best in nature and man. The 
air of refinement, the atmosphere of culture, the sense 
of the perfect, the love of the ideal, belong with the 
essential characterization of the educated person. 
They are the natural birthrights of the human being, 
and neither economic opportunity nor material pros- 
perity nor unaesthetic education should steal away 

1 Quoted from Youman, " The Culture demanded by Modern Life," 
pp. 189, 205. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 237 

these unmarketable but priceless possessions from the 
soul of man. 

It is important here to bear in mind that unity of 
consciousness which occasionally has forced itself 
upon our recognition in the progress of this discussion. 
The judging activity of consciousness is one, though 
its field of operation is threefold, viz., concerning 
truth and error, beauty and ugliness, and goodness 
and evil. In the first case we have what is commonly 
called judgment; in the second, taste; and in the 
third, conscience. Taste is judgment in the aesthetic 
field (Kant Hmited ''judgment" to this field); con- 
science is judgment in the moral field. The judging 
activity is the same, the objects judged differ. Of 
course this is not to deny the response of the feelings, 
of the sensibility, to truth, beauty, and goodness, but 
such responses get definition and estimation only 
through the act of judging. To conscience we next 
come. 

(7) Conscience and character. The mind's power Conscience, 
of judging, we saw, can be directed to that which is 
good, as well as to the true and the beautiful. Con- 
science is judgment concerning right and wrong. 
Character is what one is in consequence of what he 
wills to be. The good reported by conscience is the 
highest object of will. No man is properly educated 
whose will falls short of its noblest end. Where 
immorality is, there education has not had its perfect 
fruit. It is the will-aspect of consciousness about 
which judgments of worth centre. 

To some thinkers, notably Kant, a good will is the 
only thing of absolute value in the world. To such 



238 The Philosophy of Education 

minds the formation of moral character is the chief, 
if not the only, end of education. To Hegel educa- 
tion was "the art of making men moral." This 
conception of the purpose of education is most promi- 
nently associated with the name of Herbart, who 
found it in Kant. To quote one of the Herbartians : 
" If Kant and Herbart are right in claiming that the 
will is the proper object of all ethical valuation, it 
certainly follows that the ethical culture of the will 
must be regarded as the highest purpose of educa- 
tion." 1 And again, " Education, both as a national 
and social factor, must above all construct character." 
While affirming with these post-Kantians the unique 
value of the will as embodied in morality, our own 
conception of the end of education has been very 
much more comprehensive ; indeed, as comprehen- 
sive as the nature of the mind itself. This larger 
view is justified as soon as it becomes evident that a 
good will without intellect is undirected, and without 
emotion is powerless. 
The Habit (8) The habit of work. The educated mind has 

accustomed itself to the performance of tasks, which 
are now done well because they are done easily. The 
power of concentrated and continued attention has 
been developed through long practice. Large mental 
labors are planned and performed without waste, 
worry, or fret. The untrained mind wastes time in 
attacking work and worries through its painful and 
poor performance. The trained mind quickly dis- 
covers itself in a certain skill of execution, a certain 
air of mastery, a certain manner of self-confidence, 

1 Rein, " Pedagogics," p. 88. 



ofV^ork. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 239 

and, especially, a certain pleasure in performance. 
Without the habit of work on the part of trained 
minds, the productivity of society would cease. 

(9) Freedom. The educated man has the mental Freedom, 
freedom that comes from a knowledge of the truth. 

The bondage of ignorance is broken, the slavery of 
fear is abolished, and the subjection of superstition 
is removed. Only the sovereignty of truth is ad- 
mitted, only the perfect law of liberty is regnant. The 
inteUigence has been emancipated from the sway of 
decreed truth and freely yields itself to the leadership 
of acknowledged truth. In this spirit of truth the 
soul of man is guided into all truth, the development 
of personal power is unhampered, and individualities 
are set free. To and through every finite soul the 
Infinite has a message to deliver. There may be uni- 
formity of individual insight into truth, there should 
be no conformity of one man's mind to another man's 
truth. The limitless quality of truth permits every 
individual to possess in it a personal, instead of a 
proxy, interest. Such freedom of the educated indi- 
vidual leads naturally also to 

(10) Tolerance. To recognize the mental freedom Tolerance, 
in others which one enjoys himself is tolerance. It 
implies sympathy as the acknowledgment of the 
fundamental unity of human life. Where such sym- 
pathy is lacking, one is presented with the frequent 

and sad spectacle of freedom becoming intolerant, 
the Protestant becoming dogmatic, the Puritan becom- 
ing persecutive. A liberally trained man is as willing 
to share, as he is unwilling to lose, the freedom he 
enjoys. When the sun of truth is shining in the sky. 



240 The Philosophy of Education 



Happiness. 



The Psycho- 
logical Ideal 
of Education. 



to every voyager on the ocean of life its beams are 
reflected from the water as to himself alone. This 
free and unobstructed view is his inalienable right. 
An imaginative sympathy must widen his vision 
enough to recognize the identical right of others. 
Tolerance refuses either to force others into its boat 
or to put others in its shadow. With tolerance the 
course of life's voyage is independent, free, and happy ; 
without it, the central luminary of truth, lighting every 
man that cometh into the world, is obscured by the 
figure of man. 

(11) And finally, the educated man is happy. 
Happiness consists in the possession and use of 
one's full powers. He knows the truth, and the truth 
has made him free. He feels the beautiful, and the 
beautiful has made him gentle. He wills the good, 
and the good has made him strong. 

The briefest survey of these characteristics of the 
educated mind suggests that the end of education is 
a rounded and complete personality, integer vitcs. 
It remains to be remarked that this conception of 
education is an ideal; it is not an achievement but 
a process. The ideally educated man as described 
above does not and can not exist. The individual 
cases of educated men that one meets, present either 
arrested development in some direction or over- 
development, or both. As Dr. Donaldson^ has 
reminded us : " The avowed aim of certain edu- 
cational schemes is to produce a rounded, balanced 
individual as an outcome of the training process, a 
psychological result comparable with the ideal human 

1 " Growth of the Brain," Chap. XVIII. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 241 

form sought at one time in sculpture. Since condi- 
tions of life on the globe are not uniform, and since 
man only approaches the ideal in his development 
when in harmony with his surroundings, such an 
ideal is as fanciful as Goethe's Urpflanzer 

From the character of the ends pursued, too, it is 
evident that the ideal thus set for us is unattainable 
in a temporal process. The truth, goodness, and 
beauty pursued in the educational process of com- 
plete self-development are infinite ideals. The 
truth without error, the good without evil, the beau- 
tiful without the ugly, — these are the content of an 
absolute consciousness, whose perfection is possible 
through the imperfections of our present temporal 
order. The completion of man's education, then, 
ending in his attaining these infinite ideals, would 
require an infinite time. In other words, the com- 
pletely educated man, as herein defined, does not 
exist to-day or any day. Rather, according to 
Addison's beautiful figure, does the finite approach 
the infinite as the mathematical curve its limit, ever 
nearer and yet never there ; our imperfection leads 
us not into the darkness of despair but into the glory 
of hope. To the full implication of these considera- 
tions we must recur in the following chapter. There 
it may appear that in our present imperfection of 
educational attainment lies deeply the significance 
of life and the prophecy of our perfecting. 

" And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence 
For the fulness of the days ? " 

Meanwhile, let not the pains we have here taken 
to show that our ideal of education as defined is 

R 



242 The Philosophy of Education 

unattainable, blind us to its value for us. Even as 
it escapes us pursuing does it regulate our pursuit. 
Even as it, rising heavenward, leaves us far behind 
upon the earth, does the mantle of its influence cover 
us. Plato replied truly it was no objection to the 
Republic to say that it did not, and could not, exist 
upon the earth. " The light that never was on land 
or sea " still is " the master light of all our seeing." 
Our educational work has value in proportion as it 
embodies the ideal of complete self-realization. 

There are two terms in common usage, occasion- 
ally employed by us already in this discussion, which 
indicate those approximations to self-realization which 
the school can produce, and which summarize the 
situation of the educated mind, viz., culture, and a 
hberal education. A few words of description of 
each of these terms will serve to clarify further the 
conception of that development of mind which edu- 
cation, psychologically considered, aims to secure. 
The Nature The term culture is fallen undeservedly into some 
disrepute. The grounds for this, though actual, are, 
however, not such as really inhere in the nature of 
true culture. The term is often disliked because it 
reminds us of our imperfections ; but this it does not 
to condemn us but to lift us. Its possessors we 
imagine often as thinking of themselves more highly 
than they ought to think, and as disapproving of 
others ; but such is not the case with that true cul- 
ture wherein the sense of the still unattained is 
always present. Nor is culture selfish, but coopera- 
tive and willing to communicate its good things, for 
its presence is due to the reception of the best from 



of Culture. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 243 

all, which carries with it the duty of giving the best 
to all, according to the meaningful motto, noblesse 
oblige. 

The cultured mind literally is the tilled mind. 
Just as the culture of the soil precedes its finest 
products of plants and flowers, so the culture of the 
mind precedes its finest achievements. The tilled 
mind displays the natural virtues resident therein ; it 
has a zealous love of the best things in life ; it is de- 
voted to the ideal ; it worships the perfect. Culture 
seeks the sweet reasonableness, the eternal fitness, and 
the beautiful holiness of things. To quote neither 
from Aristotle nor from Arnold, who have compassed 
this field of sweetness and light in so final a fashion, 
but from the wonderfully brilliant Martineau : " Its 
[culture's] zeal is spent upon the highest elements 
and finest fruits of civilization, — the increase of 
knowledge, the refinement and sincerity of art, the 
purification of religion. It secures, therefore, a 
genuine liberality of mind, a sympathy with what- 
ever makes man intelligent, gracious, and noble, and 
a delight in rendering this, as far as possible, com- 
mon to all . . . the love of culture is selective ; and 
he in whom it is represented is an epitome of the 
higher faculties and influences of our life ; with sym- 
pathy less diffused over men as they are, than con- 
centrated on what they might be and are to be. . . . 
Nothing can be more happily distinctive of the lib- 
eral-minded man who impersonates our spring of 
action, than this feature, that he would rather teach 
his fellow-men than rule them." ^ 

1 Martineau, " Types of Ethical Theories," Third Ed. Vol. II, p. 214. 



244 The Philosophy of Education 

Such culture is not antagonistic to the element of 
force in personality, though the combination is rare. 
Culture is broad ; force is narrow, for vigorous action 
is always along definite lines. But a man may act 
and still have a zealous love of the best things ; such 
cultured action will be careful and discriminating, and 
it will do no violence to the sense of values. Icono- 
clastic action and culture are not consistent, but " in- 
telligent, gracious, and noble " action can emanate 
only from the cultured soul. Thus while culture 
clips the wings of violence and cripples injudicious, 
ungracious, and ignoble action, it is wings to the feet 
of the messenger of light and life. 

The following words of President Eliot will con- 
crete our discussion of culture as a serviceable syno- 
nym for the educated mind : " The worthy fruit of 
academic culture is an open mind, trained to careful 
thinking, instructed in the methods of philosophic 
investigation, acquainted in a general way with the 
accumulated thought of past generations, and pene- 
trated with humility." ^ 
A Liberal A Uberal education, we were saying, is a term also 

commonly employed to signify what the school, par- 
ticularly in its higher forms, gives the individual. A 
change has occurred in the meaning of this term since 
the great days of Greece which is indicative of a won- 
derful widening of the educational ideal. The Grecian 
liberal education was for the free man, implying the 
existence of the slave class ; the English liberal edu- 
cation is still for the gentleman, implying the existence 
of the laboring caste ; the American liberal education 

1 Eliot, " Educational Reform," p. 8. 



Education. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 245 

is for man as man, without qualifications, implying the 
equal rights of all to free self-realization. So radical a 
reformer of human society as Plato did not discern the 
possibility of universal education, providing as he does 
in the RepubUc for the training of artisans only by 
custom and experience. Aristotle, the most catholic 
mind of Greece, if not of the whole world, described 
a cultured leisure as the ideal of education from par- 
ticipation in which a large majority of the human 
family, the workers, were necessarily excluded. The 
effort of the cosmopolitan English nation to make 
their founts of learning flow freely for even their 
home people is a record of only one generation, and 
even this educational stream, started toward univer- 
sal service, has had its back eddies and counter 
currents. In the American democratic form of gov- 
ernment the idea of universal education has found 
freest historic expression and fulfilment. Here a 
liberal education is defined not as that intended for 
the free man, nor even as that intended for the gentle- 
man born, but, to quote Professor Ladd, " by a justi- 
fiable turn of meaning, a * liberal education ' may be 
defined as that which makes the free mind, which 
furnishes the liberalizing culture of the trained gentle- 
man." 1 A liberal education emancipates individual- 
ity, sets free personal powers, and widens the human 
outlook. 

It is characteristic of the education that liberalizes 
the human spirit that it be non-professional and non- 
technical. Whether an education be liberalizing or 
not depends not so much upon the subjects studied as 

1 Ladd, "The Higher Education," p. 114. 



246 The Philosophy of Education 

upon the spirit in which, and the purpose for which, 
they are studied. It was a great mistake of the advo- 
cates of the old prescribed curriculum, as against the 
introduction of the newer elements like history, the 
modern languages, and science, to suppose that 
these latter subjects were not liberalizing because 
they could be serviceable. It was also a mistake to 
suppose that the pursuit of Latin, Greek, and mathe- 
matics was always liberalizing, even when the pro- 
spective teacher or minister was intending to profit 
by them. A liberal study is one pursued for its own 
sake ; a professional study is one pursued for the sake 
of its application. Any subject in the University cata- 
logue may be either liberal or professional, according 
to the student's attitude thereto. The study of biol- 
ogy will Hberalize a ministerial student more than 
the study of Greek ; the study of Greek will liberalize 
a medical student more than the study of biology. 
The pursuit of any study for its own sake widens the 
personality of the student to cover the new territory ; 
the pursuit of any study for the sake of applying it 
narrows the personality of the student into the chan- 
nel of action. It is like two men walking together in 
the fields, the one with open mind enjoying all he 
meets and sees, the other with focussed mind hunt- 
ing for specimens; the self of the one is absorbed 
in his environment, the environment of the other 
is absorbed into his self ; the one makes the uni- 
verse the measure of himself, the other makes him- 
self the measure of the universe. It is known that 
the educational value of manual training is greater 
when the student's mind is bent toward his task rather 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 247 

than toward its proceeds. It is not the particular 
study going into a man's mind that liberalizes him ; 
it is the spirit coming forth from the man's mind as 
he studies. To study any subject in a self -forgetful, 
disinterested fashion is broadening; in a self-seeking, 
partial fashion is narrowing. Liberalizing work is 
interesting, not interested. 

As a corollary to the non-professional, non-technical, 
character of a liberal education goes also its unspe- 
cialized quality. It is only through the gate of spe- 
cialization that one enters the field of professional 
service. It is the college as the fruition of the pre- 
ceding educational agencies that is particularly de- 
signed to secure the liberal education, with its historic 
bachelor's degree as the symbol thereof. Because 
of the unspecialized character of a liberal education, 
the colleges have regularly been cautious to prevent 
speciaHzation through the requirement of at least 
a sufficient number of representative studies to 
secure a living interest in all things natural and 
human. After such a broadening, into howsoever 
narrow channels of action the streams of personality 
may later flow, they will be deep. The length and 
breadth of the college is the best preparation for the 
height and depth of the professional school. Any 
disadvantage accruing from the later acquirement of 
technique in the professional schools is offset by the 
advantage of bringing a broad personality from the col- 
lege. A well-trained mind with a less adaptable hand 
is better than a less-trained mind with a more adaptable 
hand, as an equipment for professional study. First 
a man, then a workman ; first be, then do ; first make 



248 The Philosophy of Education 

life worth living, then make a living in life; first 
righteousness, joy, and peace in the inner rnan, then 
an abundance of possessions. The lawyer, the doctor, 
the engineer, are men as well as professionalists. 
They are citizens, they are friends, they have homes, 
they live in the wonderful world, and their horizon 
should not be limited by the courtroom, the hospital, 
and the factory. Just as specialization with a broad 
basis is the highest safety of society, so specialization 
with a narrow basis is a menace to society. As John 
Stuart Mill says, " A man's mind is as fatally narrowed, 
and his feelings toward the great ends of humanity 
as miserably stunted, by giving all his thoughts to 
the classification of a few insects, or the resolution 
of a few equations, as to sharpening the points or 
putting on the heads of pins." Those professional 
schools which aim to send experts into society to 
alleviate increasingly the lot of man through the lofty 
passion for noble service will favor the current ten- 
dency to require a bachelor's diploma from a reputable 
college of their applicants for admission. On the 
other hand, those professional schools which aim to 
provide society with servants of special technical 
equipment without great regard to prior general train- 
ing will continue to demand the abbreviation or omis- 
sion of the college course. It may be that in the 
complexity of human needs each kind of professional 
school will find its peculiar function, but the existence 
of the former is indispensable for the enrichment of 
society. 

America has always demanded the application of 
its educated power. Whether the education be lib- 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 249 

eral or technical, or both, it must always do some- 
thing in the end. Unlike Greece, America has felt 
that the educated class was not apart from society but 
a part of society ; unlike England, America has felt 
that the appHcation of science is not vulgarizing but 
elevating. Catholicity and equally extensive service- 
ableness have been the distinctive notes of American 
liberal education. As President Wheeler has recently 
written, "The American passion for sweetness and 
light will be fulfilled in such as are not knowers 
only, but doers of the doctrine." ^ 

Despite the fa.ct that America stands for the educa- 
tion of man as man, in practice our society falls dis- 
tressingly short of this lofty ideal. As Professor 
Dewey writes, " Hardly one per cent of the entire 
school population ever attains to what we call 
higher education ; only five per cent to the grade of 
our high school ; while much more than half leave on 
or before the completion of the fifth year of the ele- 
mentary grade." ^ Thus liberal education to-day in 
the freest of lands and at the acme of historic educa- 
tional progress is still for the few and not for the 
many, as it was in the old unchristian days of Aris- 
totle. Through emphasis upon the basic idea of 
equal opportunity to all men upon which the Ameri- 
can Commonwealth rests, through the enlightenment 
of public opinion as to the true scale of values in life, 
through a quickened sense of the educational duty of 
parents to children and of man to himself, through a 
heightened recognition of what education does for 

1 The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1903, "A National Type of Culture." 

2 Dewey, " The School and Society," p. 42. 



250 The Philosophy of Education 

the individual and for society, it is incumbent upon 
all true Americans everywhere to extend increasingly 
the unmixed blessings of a liberal education. 

There are certain famous words of Huxley so fitly 
spoken, like apples of gold in pictures of silver, that 
we cannot do better than conclude this present dis- 
cussion with them. He writes : " That man, I think, 
has had a liberal education who has been so trained 
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his 
will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work 
that, as a mechanism, it is capable of ; whose intellect 
is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal 
strength, and in smooth working order ; ready, like a 
steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and 
spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of 
the mind; whose mind is stored with the knowledge 
of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and 
of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted 
ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions 
are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the 
servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to 
love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all 
vileness, and to respect others as himself. 

" Such a man and no other, I conceive, has had a 
liberal education ; for he is, as completely as a man 
can be, in harmony with Nature. He will make the 
best of her and she of him. They will get on to- 
gether rarely ; she as his ever beneficent mother ; he 
as her mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister 
and interpreter." ^ 

We have now given our answer to the three ques- 

1 Huxley, " Science and Education," p. 86. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 251 

tions that cover the psychological aspect of education ; Fourth 
we have seen the nature of that self -activity whereby ^f^^^^^^^^^ 
mental development is reached, the nature of that tion. 
mental development which, psychologically consid- 
ered, is the end of education, and the detailed char- 
acteristics of the developed mind, together with its 
general description in terms of culture and a liberal 
education. Psychology has added to our preceding 
definition of education the element of mental devel- 
opment. It remains now to combine this result with 
those biological, physiological, and sociological con- 
clusions earlier reached in our next definition of 
education as follows : Education is the superior 
adjustment of a physically and mentally developed 
conscious human being to his intellectual^ emotional^ 
and volitional environment. 

There are other definitions of education that might Other 
be framed which would perhaps be more elegant in Educatkm °^ 
expression but doubtless less adequate in content. 
One might say with truth that education is self- 
development through self-activity for self-hood and 
social service. This definition is adequate from all 
points of view except the biological, which insists that 
education must provide the individual with proper 
adaptation to his environment. " Self-hood " means 
the state of possessing the self's realized powers. 
This definition is convenient in that, to the nature of 
education as self-development, it adds the means in 
self -activity, and the end in self-hood and social 
service. 

It might be an interesting but hardly a profitable 
undertaking to pass in review the historic definitions 



252 The Philosophy of Education 

of education from Plato to Spencer with a view to 
comparing them with our own. It would be mostly 
a verbal display. Suffice it to say that most defini- 
tions of the educational reformers stress truly one 
or more of the aspects of education, without present- 
ing that comprehensive view which it has been our 
purpose to obtain. Bacon's definition, to take an 
example, emphasizes the intellectual element, when 
he says, " Education is the cultivation of a just and 
legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things." 
The But there is one rather common and decidedly too 

Making euloffistic description of education which deserves 

of a Man. ° ^ 

comment. The classic statements of the great Kant 
may be taken as illustrating this conception. He 
writes : " Man can only become man by education. 
He is merely what education makes of him."^ But 
education is something less than the making of a 
man. There are at least three elements in the mak- 
ing of a man, viz., heredity, environment, and effort. 
Many scientists would prefer to reduce the three to 
two, and say that heredity and environment are 
enough. But perhaps the preceding discussions of 
the nature of history, of self-activity, and of effort, 
will seem warrant to the reader, as they do to the 
writer, for including effort, or will, as the third 
factor. Man, the completed product, is partly born, 
is partly made, and he partly makes himself. Shake- 
speare rightly classified the influences that make men 
in his famous sentence, '* Some men are born great, 
some achieve greatness, and some have greatness 
thrust upon them." Each of these elements in man- 

^ Churton, " Kant on Education," p. 6. 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 253 

making is of essential importance ; the influences of 
heredity are latent and lasting all one's life ; those 
of environment are actual and omnipresent, those of 
effort redirect inherited impulses and overcome en- 
vironing obstacles. As Hamlet says, "Use almost 
can change the stamp of nature." 

Now our educational endeavors have not as yet 
been able to include and to manage the fact and 
influence of heredity, despite Dr. Holmes's famous 
witticism about choosing one's grandparents. Edu- 
cation has not as yet succeeded in leavening the 
lump of social opinion sufficiently to insure to the 
new generation the precious blessing of being well 
born. And yet the desirability of just this thing was 
recognized two millenniums and more ago by Plato, 
who, to effect it in his Republic, made an impossible 
reorganization of the family life. Education's slow 
but only hope in getting possession of the influence 
of heredity is through the patient instruction of the 
masses. 

Of the two remaining elements of man-making, 
viz., environment and effort, education is in partial 
possession. The school, with all its equipment of 
curriculum, apparatus, and teachers, is a large sec- 
tion of the pupil's environment. In the school, 
through effortful reaction upon the educational stim- 
uli supplied by his environment, and upon his own 
inherited inclinations, the child becomes father to 
the man; self-selected thoughts get embodied in 
deeds ; repeated deeds fashion habits ; combined 
habits make character, and character is destiny. 
Thus education assists, but does not cover, the art of 



254 The Philosophy of Education 

making a man. This impossible task for it educa- 
tion cheerfully resigns in favor of its more modest, 
but equally real, service of bringing out what is in 
man. 
TheTran- Herewith is concluded the discussion of the last 

!^"°"^'"°.™ of the empirical characteristics of the being to be 
caitothe educated, viz., intelligence, following upon the dis- 
PhiT^^ cussion of his other empirical characteristics, viz., 

sophicaiDis- life, body, and sociality. We have seen what the 
cussion. nature of education is so far as the empirical nature 
of the educable being is concerned. Thus far expe- 
rience. Beyond experience we cannot go, except in 
thought, by following out consistently to their logical 
conclusion the clear implications of experience. It 
may be that folded within the finite facts so far con- 
sidered are suggestions of deeper truths and higher 
meanings than have as yet appeared. Even if the 
educational processes that, as we discussed them, 
seemed so vital with significance and pregnant with 
intimations of what must be the truth of truths, the 
really real, the ultimate fact, even if these invaluable 
human activities are deceptive, and mean nothing 
deeper and truer than appears, — this too must be 
discovered by proper methods of reasoning upon 
what does appear. 

At this point many may turn back and say. Who 
will show us any further truth than experience dis- 
covers .'* But the philosophically minded will reply 
that this same experience, to which appeal is made 
to check the ultimate seekings of the human mind, 
itself thrusts questions upon us which it does not 
completely answer, intimates more than it tells, sug- 



The Psychological Aspect of Education 255 

gests more than it asserts, and implies more than it 
reveals. To be true to experience then is not to stop 
thinking at its boundaries but by thinking to inter- 
pret the meaning of such fragmentary experience in 
terms of its implications concerning the infinite and 
eternal. To such readers the invitation is extended 
to follow us still as we seek the ultimate nature of 
education, in view of that characteristic of man, the 
educable being, which makes him in thought already 
the inhabitant of an eternal, rational, passionate, and 
purposeful world. Just as the astronomer is led to 
assert the existence of an unknown and undiscovered 
planet through the perturbations that do appear, 
which planet later experience may discover, so is the 
philosopher led to assert those things as ultimately 
true which alone give intelligibihty to present facts, 
and which, too, later experience will correct and 
verify. As the scientist is the discoverer of fact, so 
is the philosopher the interpreter of fact. Our one 
remaining question is, then. What is the meaning of 
education as hitherto defined ? for the answer to 
which we turn to the Philosophical Aspect of Edu- 
cation. 

REFERENCES ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT OF 
EDUCATION 

Bain, Education as a Science, Chap. III. 

De Garmo, Herbart and the Herbartians. 

De Garmo, Interest and Education. 

Dewey, Interest as related to Will. 

Dexter and Garlick, Psychology in the Schoolroom. 

Eliot, Educational Reform, V. 

Froebel, The Education of Man. 



256 The Philosophy of Education 

Gordy, A Broader Elementary Education. 
Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, Chap. IV. 
Herbart, The Science of Education. 

— — , Introduction to the Science and Practice of Education. 
Huxley, Science and Education, IV. 
James, Talks to Teachers. 
Ladd, The Higher Education. 
McLellan and Dewey, Applied Psychology. 
Munsterberg, Psychology and Life, Essay on Psychology and 
Education. 
Palmer, The New Education. 
Pestalozzi, Leonard and Gertrude. 
Putnam, A Manual of Pedagogics, pp. 92-115. 
Royce, Is there a Science of Education ? Ed. Rev. I. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECT OF EDUCATION 

The characteristic method of philosophy is to take The Method 
what facts it can find in a given field of human expe- phy^^"'''°' 
rience and seek to determine their meaning. Each 
such field is itself a fragment of the whole human 
experience, and our whole human experience appears 
itself but a fragment, implying for its interpretation 
the existence of a still larger and inclusive experience 
within which all meanings get their fulfilment. Any 
such chosen section of human experience indicates 
something as to its own final value and lasting signifi- 
cance. The part implies the whole, and the meaning 
of the part it is that suggests the nature of the whole. 
The method of philosophy is to construct the whole 
from the meaning of some of its parts, just as the 
complete statue or animal is restored by artist or sci- 
entist from its bust or bone. Philosophy has no new 
facts of its own to consider, it has only to consider 
the old facts in its own new way. Given such frag- 
ments of experience as men possess, to restore the 
whole, that is the problem of philosophy. What 
must the final truth be in order to do justice to this 
fragmentary bit of experience as now known ? This is 
the question of philosophy. The instrument of phi- 
losophy is thought, as it attempts to follow out in some 
s 257 



258 The Philosophy of Education 



The 

Question of 
the Philoso- 
phy of 
Education. 



final and self-consistent fashion the intimations of 
partial experiences. The invisible things are really 
made known in part through the things that do 
appear, just as Agassiz or Gray could describe the 
life-history of an animal or plant from tooth or leaf. 
One thing implies another, things go together, noth- 
ing is isolated and unrelated, all things are interde- 
pendent in the unity of the whole, — such well-known 
truths as these philosophy takes seriously, and from 
such details as it can find it attempts the work of res- 
toration. It is a perfectly legitimate method of men- 
tal procedure, as used and vindicated by both science 
and art; only the whole which philosophy seeks is 
larger, even reahty itself. In brief, the method of 
philosophy is reflection. 

From this definition of its method it is apparent 
that the question of the philosophy of education is 
this, what are the implications of education ? What 
does the empirical nature of education as already 
defined through the related sciences of fact suggest 
as to its ultimate nature .'' Philosophy has no new 
educational facts to present ; it asks only concerning 
the significance of the facts already in. It takes our 
educational experience, already narrated, as given, 
and concerning so notable a matter of human life, it 
reflectively inquires as to its meaning. Just as there 
is a philosophy of art, religion, the state, human con- 
duct, etc., so is there a philosophy of education. 
Like these other departments of human life, educa- 
tion has its own facts suggesting meanings in their 
own way. Its facts, of course, are like other facts in 
that they are closely woven into our unitary human 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education, 259 

life; and the meanings they suggest in their own 
characteristic way ought also to fit in harmoniously 
with the meanings already wrought out in the phi- 
losophies of other subjects. All facts ultimately mean 
the same, but they mean the same in their own unique 
ways ; just as signboards on different roads leading 
to the same city point by different ways to the same 
goal. ReaUty is the heavenly city of philosophy and 
education is one of its signboards. 

What then is the reality as indicated by education ? Two preiimi- 
Attempting first to put the facts of education all to- Q^Jneraiiza- 
gether so as to view them as one, two things are seen, tions. 
viz., education is a world-process, and it is a temporal AWorid- 
process. Education is a world-process ; it is the P'^^^^^^* 
world at work developing a man into the fulness of 
his stature. Philosophy with its inclusive view makes 
us return at once to the broad conception of educa- 
tion as defined in the first chapter ; all the experiences 
of life, as well as those of the school, go into the de- 
velopment of man. Just as it takes all the creative 
powers in the acme of their exercise to make a man, 
so it takes all the influences of life to develop a man. 
Unimaginable ages of creative effort preceded the 
birth of a human child ; unimaginable ages of educa- 
tional effort must succeed his birth to round out man's 
power. The heart of humanity in which eternity is 
set, the mind of man with its eye opened to the in- 
finite, have in our brief span of historic time not yet 
begun to disclose all their latent secrets to the genial 
and generous influences of their increasingly edu- 
cational environment. Education is the process 
whereby human kind is working out into fruition its 



26o The Philosophy of Education 

own inner nature ; it is man's means of realizing his 
destination, of reaching his goal of largest power, joy, 
and service. It is a narrow though valuable sense 
of the term which limits the meaning of education 
to the influence of the school consciously brought to 
bear through the agency of the teacher upon the 
pupil ; in the broadest, truest sense of the term, it is 
the sum total of the influences of life that educate a 
man. All things develop the human being, whether 
home or business, church or state, self or others, joy 
or sorrow, victory or defeat, life or death. The world 
is busy while men grow. As Browning sings, 

" I count life just a stuff 
To try the soul's strength on, educe the man." 

A Temporal Education is also a temporal process. Philoso- 
phers are not agreed whether time is a characteristic 
of the ultimate reality or not ; that is, some say all 
reality falls within the stream of time ; others say 
that the stream of time itself flows within the terri- 
tory of reality. The weight of opinion seems to favor 
the view that reality is independent of the temporal 
process, that time is but one of the many ways in 
which reality exists, but that the temporal process, so 
far as its nature allows, manifests in finite fashion 
the non-temporal infinite reality. Education belongs 
decidedly to the temporal process. In that reality 
where is no time, any educational process is unimag- 
inable. Indeed, all things in human experience, 
except the objects of thought, dwell within the stream 
of time. We think in time but of things, like truth, 
which are eternal, — before, behind, and beyond, the 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 261 

growth and decay of time. Time is the presupposi- 
tion of education, without which as the logical condi- 
tion of succession, of change from less to more, no 
development could take place. In time the latent 
becomes the kinetic, the potential the real, and the 
actual approaches the ideal. From the fertile womb 
of time man is born into the world, after which all 
the events of time combine to nourish him. 

It is the growing insight of our own age that the 
development of organic forms through all the vast 
periods of uncounted past time is a significant natural 
process, voicing in long-drawn cadence the word of 
the Absolute. The one-way, irreversible process of 
organic evolution is one of the efforts of time to tell 
the story of the eternal. Just as the nature of justice 
appeared more plainly to Plato when writ large in the 
structure of the state, so the nature of reality appears 
more plainly when writ large through the past centu- 
ries of productive change. If the world of matter 
in its unrepeatable processes of evolution is a parable 
of the truth, how much more may we expect that 
the world of mind in its self-conscious development 
through natural and educational agencies is a revela- 
tion of reality.? Mental as well as material devel- 
opment must be declaratory of the hidden things. 
Education is the process of evolution become con- 
scious of itself. The story begun by the fire-mist, 
the spiral nebulae, the hot stars, the cooling planets, 
the inhabitable earth, and the growth of life, ought 
to be continued in the conscious effort of man to 
realize his nature and fulfil his destiny. Otherwise 
the universe cannot complete the story it was able to 



262 The Philosophy of Education 

begin. As a significant conscious process of develop- 
ment in time, whereby immaturity reaches maturity, 
and the child becomes a man, education ought to be 
a chapter in the serial which the universe is writing 
through time in the heavens and upon the earth. 
The constitution of things is so well framed to edu- 
cate man that one is easily led through the gate of 
education back into that reality whence man came 
and whither he goes. As the rare Paulsen writes, 
" Thus we are forced to repeat the demand. Out 
of all the infinite possibilities construct a world that 
would have been better fitted than ours to educate 
man and would have accomplished more." ^ 

If the temporal is just man's present inadequate 
experience of the eternal, is that measure of the 
eternal which the mind of man can span, is, in fact, 
in the eternal without which it would be an abstrac- 
tion, then a significant, notable, and valuable tem- 
poral process like education ought to imply in a 
certain degree the very nature of the eternal. What 
are these ultimate impHcations of education } This 
is the question of the philosophy of education. 

In thus seeing that education from the philosophi- 
cal point of view is a world-process and a significant 
temporal process, we are led into the very heart of 
our whole inquiry concerning the nature and mean- 
ing of education. Any ultimate meanings we can 
find in the empirical educational process will reflect 
brighter light upon the nature of that process itself. 
It is the lower that suggests the higher and the 
higher that interprets the lower. 

1 Paulsen, "Introduction to Philosophy" (Tr. Thilly), p. 326. 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 263 

The implications of education can be grouped The impiica- 
about three main concepts, viz., the origin of man, Education, 
the nature of man, and the destiny of man. The 
discussion must be limited to the self-consciousness 
of man, so as to exclude the body, the problems of 
which belong to the natural sciences. 

First, as to the origin of man. According to the The Origin 
reflective method of philosophy we must first array °^ ^^' 
our facts and then see their implication. There are 
three well-known facts of the educational process, 
selected from the foregoing discussions, which, by 
suggestion, will partly illumine this subject. 

(a) Education, as a human process with a mean- Mindis 
ing to spell concerning the truth, seizes upon mind ^^^* 
as the final useful appendage to the organism in its 
upward evolution. That which nature by sponta- 
neous variation, the struggle for existence, and the 
survival of the fit, bestows as its last best gift to the 
organism, education seizes upon to improve, thus 
raising evolution from the unconscious natural to 
the conscious mental plane. The highest type of 
selective agency of man, — education, lays hold upon 
the highest selected product of nature, — mind, for 
further improvement, thereby indicating mind as the 
highest type of temporal reality. Education by its 
emphases practises the saying of Sir WilHam Hamil- 
ton, viz., " In the world there is nothing great but 
man ; in man there is nothing great but mind." 
The school and also the other more general educa- 
tive agencies of civilization lay all their stress upon 
mind as the most valuable, the most useful, the most 
real, element in life. Chosen last as the result of 



264 The Philosophy of Education 

an incalculably long, prehistoric process of natural 
selection, mind is become first. Education may be 
pardoned its ontological boldness if it questions 
reflectively whether the reality it selects as ultimate 
is not the ultimate reality. Is not reality mental ? 
The (3) To take the second familiar fact (since philoso- 

M^nd^r P^3^ presents us with no new facts) which may pro- 
realized, vide us with a thread of meaning, to lead us through 
the labyrinth of the phenomenal into the open place 
of the noumenal, viz., education shows us a develop- 
ment, the unrealized powers of mind through exer- 
cise becoming actualized. But what in the nature of 
things is the possibility of development ? that educa- 
tion inquires which has begun to scrutinize its ulti- 
mate bases. Can something develop from nothing ? 
in disobedience of the dicta alike of mediaeval 
scholasticism and modern biology .? Can mind come 
from something not itself mental ? the unlike giving 
birth to the Hke. Can maturity of mind develop out 
of simple immaturity.? time thus making additions 
to the sum total of reality as against what might be 
called the law of the unity and conservation of the 
Absolute. Can that develop in the temporal process 
which is not eternally realized .? as against the doc- 
trine of the Stagirite that there is no hvvaiii^ without 
^vepyeia. Education finds itself unable to understand 
how the development of unrealized mind which it 
secures can occur without implying that, underneath 
its whole process and giving power at every point, 
is the one realized mind. Not a first cause in a tem- 
poral series of events does education reflectively and 
vainly seek, but an adequate cause of its great cen- 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 265 

tral fact of development. This it satisfactorily finds 
only in the existence of a mind which needs no 
development itself, and so can guarantee the fruitful- 
ness of all educational efforts for development. Thus 
education upon reflection is forced to hold that the 
reality it declares mental it must also declare actual. 

(c) Man is the only educable being. The horse, The 
the do2f, — the lower animals, are trained, not edu- ^}^.^°}^^^ 

°' ' ' Mmd IS 

cated. Apparently the lower creature frames to Seif-active. 
himself no goal to be reached, no moral or intel- 
lectual end to be attained, no development to be 
secured. There is direction, but not self -direction ; 
consciousness, but not self -consciousness ; inherited 
instinct, but not conceptual reasoning. Such intelli- 
gences are trained, through processes of associative 
memory, but not educated, through the pursuit of 
rational ends self-consciously conceived. The divid- 
ing line between training and education is uncertain 
but real. In the field of animal intelligence least of 
all is the modern psychologist permitted to dogmatize. 
He only finds man with a history, literature, science, 
and the arts of civilization which the lower animal 
lacks. He knows man's works are due to his powers 
of symbolic thinking. He must suspect then that this 
is the distinguishing characteristic of man, differentiat- 
ing him from the lower animals. All his observations 
go to confirm, and nothing to contradict, this position. 
To quote Professor James : " One total object 
suggests another total object, and the lower mam- 
mals find themselves acting with propriety, they 
know not why. The great, the fundamental, defect 
of their minds seems to be the inability of their 



266 The Philosophy of Education 

groups of ideas to break across in unaccustomed 
places. They are enslaved to routine, to cut-and- 
dried thinking ; and if the most prosaic of human 
beings could be transported into his dog's soul, he 
would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy 
which there reigns. Thoughts would not be found 
to call up their similars, but only their habitual suc- 
cessors. Sunsets would not suggest heroes* deaths, 
but supper-time. This is why man is the only meta- 
physical animal." ^ If these things be true, and they 
have not been gainsaid, it is only a humorous exaggera- 
tion to speak of educated animals. The lower creation 
seems to lack that power of self-directed pursuit of 
consciously conceived ends which makes education 
possible. This power we have already named, in 
brief, self-activity. Man is the only educable being 
because only he has a sufficient measure of self-activ- 
ity to attain by effort rational ends. 

"The nature of education is determined by the 
nature of mind — that it can develop what is in itself 
only by its own activity. . . . Education is the influ- 
encing of man by man, and it has for its end to lead 
him to actualize himself through his own efforts. . . . 
Man, therefore, is the only fit subject for education. 
We often speak, it is true, of the education of plants 
and animals ; but, even when we do, we apply other 
expressions, as 'raising,' 'breaking,' 'breeding,' and 
'training,' in order to distinguish it from the edu- 
cation of man. ' Training ' consists in producing in 
an animal, either by pain or pleasure of the senses, 
an activity of which, it is true, he is capable, but 

1 James, " Briefer Psychology," p. 369. 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 267 

which he never would have developed if left to 
himself." 1 

The education that has grown reflective as to its 
foundations asks concerning the source of this self- 
activity which man displays and which makes of him 
the only fit subject of educational endeavor. A suffi- 
cient cause of man's self-activity is in question. The 
cause of any phenomenon in the last analysis reduces 
itself to the statement of the relation in which that 
phenomenon stands to the whole of which it is a part. 
Nothing short of the whole absolute reality is the 
complete cause of the fall of a sparrow or the loss of 
a hair. The sole, invariable, and necessary antecedent 
of a phenomenon cannot be found this side the whole 
truth, the sum total of things that are. The reality 
of which man is a part, is a unity ; to assert any divi- 
sion in reality is to imply the w^hole so divided ; to 
assert any multiplicity of real principles is to imply 
a corresponding multiplicity of inter-relationships be- 
tween them, like good and bad, light and darkness, 
idea and matter, etc., which thus reduce themselves 
to one system. Is the whole of which self -active man 
is a part itself self-active ? It is to be noted that man 
is not absolutely self-active, but he is limited just in 
so far as he is a part and not the whole. His limits 
he becomes aware of in the forces of heredity and 
the influences of environment. But the whole of 
which man is a part is not limited, being itself inclu- 
sive of all that is. Within this whole a measure of 
self-activity is discovered in man. Here is a self- 
activity of a certain degree then going on within the 

1 Rosenkranz, " Philosophy of Education," Tr. Brackett, pp. 19-20. 



268 The Philosophy of Education 

whole, which the whole itself, being the whole, could 
not have received from beyond. There is limited 
self-activity within the whole in man, the whole is thus 
self-active, and so absolutely self-active. If there is 
a movement within the whole, then the whole is 
responsible for the movement, and so the whole pos- 
sesses the quality of self-movement. The sufficient 
source of that self-activity which education finds in 
man is reached thus only in an absolutely self-active 
whole. The ultimate reality, which education implies 
to be mental and actual, it also implies to be self- 
active. 

If it be true, as education would seem to warrant 
us in supposing, that reality is one actualized self- 
active mind, then it would likewise appear that man, 
as the only educable being, a potential mind capable 
of actualization through its limited self-activity, is the 
highest manifestation in the temporal process of the 
true reality. The self-activity of man, conditioning 
his education, is the clearest expression in the limits 
of time of the immanent and transcendent self -activity 
of reality. It is as though in man realizing his des- 
tiny through self-activity, the Absolute beheld himself 
reflected. The Absolute is ; the finite becomes. 
The Origin Putting together these matters we may say, educa- 

God^^^^ tion implies, in the first place, as the origin of man, 
a reality which is mental, realized, and self-active. 
In religious language this absolute reality is called 
God. 
The Con- The Conception of God as herein reached is that of 

God°^ °^ one absolute mind, complete and self -moving. Being 
absolute, there are no other gods ; being mind, He is not 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 269 

less than personal, however far He transcends the 
human conception of personality ; being complete in 
Himself, there is no change of time, neither increase 
nor decrease ; time exists in Him as a part, but He 
does not exist in time and grow old with the centuries ; 
being self-active, He is not the transmitter of an 
alien limiting force but is the infinite free being, the 
adequate explanation of all force, energy, and move- 
ment that appear in time. From the point of view of 
the speculative physicist, matter disappears into some 
form of energy, like electricity; from the point of 
view of the speculative philosopher, energy disap- 
pears into some form of consciousness, like attention. 

The only energy whose nature man really knows 
through immediate experience is that which his 
own consciousness exerts when he voluntarily or in- 
voluntarily attends. Here is energy at first hand; 
other energy, Hke electricity, appears at second hand 
in what it does, not at first hand in what it is. The 
energy of the world thus in the last analysis may be 
held to be the attentive aspect of the consciousness of 
God. 

This conception of God is not that of the transcen- idealistic 
dent Jehovah of the ancient Hebrews, for God is in 
His world ; neither is it that of the immanent Deus 
sive Natura of the great Jewish philosopher, Spinoza, 
for the world and we are in God, living and moving 
and having our being. Our conception is neither a 
transcendent dualism, nor an immanent pantheism, but 
an idealistic theism. God is the self-conscious unity 
of all reality. Within His life falls the life of nature 
and of man. We are the content of His consciousness, 



Theism. 



270 The Philosophy of Education 

and not we only, but all that which is, whether the 
heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters 
under the earth, — all that we know is a part of the 
infinite fulness of the content of His consciousness. 

The error of pantheism consists in saying, All is God, 
instead of saying. All is God's. The ultimate reality is 
not to be spoken about as It ; but to be spoken to as 
Thou. The error of transcendent dualism consists in 
supposing the world is without, instead of considering 
it as within, the life of God. He is not far away from 
any one of us ; it is not even enough to say. He is with 
us and within us, and within the world; but we must go 
the whole way with St. Paul and say, we live and move 
and have our being in Him. The true doctrine of 
immanence is not that God is in nature and man, but 
that man and nature are in God. The truth is not an 
immanent God, but an immanent world ; the world 
dwells in God, not God in the world. God is the 
including consciousness; the world is a part of 
the included content. God is the infinite Person in 
the unity of whose consciousness all things exist ; the 
widening stream of time with its natural and human 
developments is a significant process in His conscious- 
ness, in which He is interested from before the 
foundation of the world as the fulfilment of one of 
His own meanings, and which is interested in Him as 
rapidly as it becomes conscious of its own explanation. 
Matter is the objective thought of the infinite con- 
sciousness, no less real, substantial, and soHd on that 
account than it shows itself in man's experience, but 
nevertheless ultimately a process of thought in the 
consciousness of God. This is the doctrine of ide- 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 271 

alistic theism to which education brings us as the 
only adequate interpretation of its own implications 
concerning the origin of man. 

A great new Hght is thus thrown upon the final The Environ- 
nature of the environment of man, hitherto described ™^"* .°^ 
as intellectual, emotional, and volitional, in adjust- 
I ment to which consists the education of man. The 
j environment of man is God. Science, reached by 
I the intellect of man, is the thought of God in the 
world ; Art, reached by the emotions of man, is the 
feeling of God in the world; and Volition, as ex- 
pressed through the will of man, is the plan of God 
in the world. We work out our own science, art, and 
volition, the health of civilization, our salvation, with 
fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in us 
both to will and to do of His good pleasure. Because 
the world is the product of the Logos, the thought, 
of God, it is intelligible to man; because it is the 
product of the f eehng of God, it is beautiful to man ; 
because it is the product of the will of God, it is 
good to man. The Word became the world and 
dwelt about us, before it became the flesh and dwelt 
among us. Without the Word was not anything 
made that was made. There is a material as there 
is a human manifestation of the mind of God in time. 
Those impersonal ideals of education descriptive 
of man's environment, viz., truth, beauty, and good- 
ness, become personalized in the one inclusive con- 
sciousness of God. The world is His, and the fulness 
thereof. The true, the beautiful, and the good 
are the ideals of man because they are the ideas 
of God. He thinks the truth, enjoys the perfect, and 



272 The Philosophy of Education 

wills the good. Thus much is sure, as the temporal 
process reveals, and infinitely more, too, unexpressed 
in time and so not entered into the mind of man to 
conceive. This last it is necessary to say emphati- 
cally in order to avoid the errors, while enjoying the 
fruits, of necessary anthropomorphism. No doubt 
the infinite God has other ways of revealing Himself 
to man than through the temporal order, but this is 
the present plan. To us now He speaks only through 
an environment, world-old, containing its essential 
elements of knowing, feeling, and willing. This 
total temporal environment is one part of the con- 
tent of His consciousness ; it is as a unit His temporal 
manifestation, His Son, which came to consciousness 
of itself as one with Him in the unique Person of 
all time, His greatest Son, Jesus of Nazareth, the 
Christ. 
The Trinity. God is the sclf-conscious unity of all reality ; 
nothing falls beyond His providential care. In this 
complete unity of self-consciousness, one can make 
abstractions of thought that do not exist in reality. 
There is the infinite Subject, the thinker, the I, the 
Father, who does not exist apart from the infinite 
Object, the thought, the Me, the Son, a portion of 
which is the temporal order, rising into clear con- 
sciousness of itself in Jesus, and there is the concrete 
unity of both aspects in one Being, the Spirit. God 
is Spirit. And the whole is one Person, as any self- 
conscious individual, himself a subject-object, is one. 
This is the true Trinity indeed, showing forth the 
social nature of God. This counting of the phases 
of the Absolute Self-consciousness, to which we are 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 273 

brought through the recognition of the environment 
of man as a manifestation of the ideas of God, is as 
important as it is interesting because of its historic 
and controversial bearings. 

The sum of our discussion of the origin of man as Summary, 
suggested by the implications of his education is, that 
the adequate explanation of man as an educable being 
is an actualized, self-active, Mind, namely, God, made 
manifest to man through his temporal environment. 

Second, as to the nature of man. Following our The Nature 
now familiar and characteristic method of philosophy, °^^^°- 
we have to point out three factual considerations upon 
which rest the implications of education concerning 
the nature of man. These considerations are not 
novel to us after ploughing through the preceding 
pages, only we have not as yet seen their deeper 
meaning. Philosophy is always thus adding the 
meaning of things to their seeming. 

{a) Education is the product of the mind's effort. The 
The development of mind is from within out, not of^he Pu^pii. 
from without in. No teacher and no curriculum 
can educate the youth who will not respond. The 
teacher may lead the pupil to the founts of learning, 
but he cannot make him drink. The teacher's art, 
as some one has said, consists in making the pupil so 
thirsty that he will want to drink. Teaching is not 
so much the cause of learning, which is so frequently 
asserted, as it is the occasion or condition of learning. 
The cause of learning is the pupil himself and his 
effort. The teacher, the curriculum, the apparatus, 
the school buildings, — these all are but the stimu- 
lating environment of the pupil. The teacher is like 

T 



274 The Philosophy of Education 

the gardener who digs about and nourishes the plant 
which grows of its own impulse. The pupil is like 
the plant so stimulated in so far as his response is 
his own, but he is unlike the plant in that his re- 
sponse may be withheld. There is a possible wilful 
obstinacy in pupils that does not appear in plants. 
If they do not become educated in the day of their 
visitation from the teacher, it is because they would 
not. The ultimate responsibility for winning an edu- 
cation rests with the will of the pupil. We try to 
teach, train, instruct, and discipline him, but we can- 
not educate him; he must educate himself. Every 
educated man is self-educated; the only difference 
is that in some cases the stimulating and nourishing 
environment was lacking, unfortunately so for both 
the man and his self-education, while in the other 
cases the man had good assistance. The pupil's ulti- 
mate power to make himself work must be acknowl- 
edged by teachers. Their function is not to make 
pupils learn but to make learning so attractive and 
compelling in interest that pupils will want to learn ; 
not theirs to hector over and be-lecture pupils, but to 
provide a happy occupation for their free individuali- 
ties. Not in me, not in me, sayeth the teacher, but 
the kingdom of education is within you. Education, 
all this means to say, is the result of the effort of the 
self -active mind to assimilate the incoming stimuli from 
the school ; is free individuality expressing itself. 
Results {b) Education presents us with results proportion- 

al to Effort ^^^ ^^ ^^^^^ expended. The degree of effort put 
forth by the pupil in response to his educative en- 
vironment, determines his educational attainment. 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 275 

The same school stimuli receive different responses 
from different individuals ; the educational process 
is not so much the stimulus shaping the individual, 
as the individual responding to the stimulus. The 
same school sends forth pupils with a diversity of 
attainments, because the same stimuh have received 
individual responses. Just as the natural world, 
though one, has produced a variety of organisms 
through their individual reactions upon its stimuli, 
so the unitary environment of the school produces 
a variety of achievements through the individual 
responses of the pupils. The greater the effort 
expended, within the natural limits of health, the 
greater the amount of knowledge and the degree of 
development secured. One pupil puts forth more 
effort than another, he thereby secures a greater 
return. This is indisputable. It may even appear 
that the same pupil in successive periods of time 
gains in proportion as he expends. Strenuous one 
term, slack the next, his developed efficiency is cor- 
respondingly more and less. It is as though the 
degree of effort of the individual were variable in 
amount. Not simply the prior question of whether 
he will work or not, but also the present question of 
how much he will work, seems subject to the free 
decision of his own personality. Will I give atten- 
tion at all.? How much attention will I give? 
These two ultimate questions are answerable only 
by the individual pupil himself, and upon their mo- 
mentous answers hang the weight of his present and 
future education. Every pupil is the keeper of his 
own educational results. 



276 The Philosophy of Education 



Partial 
Self-realiza- 
tion attained. 



The Nature 
of Man is 
Freedom. 



The Nature 
of Freedom. 



{c) Through the energy of effortful attention man 
becomes in his education what he is intended to be ; 
he realizes his nature; develops his natural potential- 
ities; attains his mental majority; declares his in- 
tellectual independence; is emancipated from the 
slavery of ignorance, superstition, fear, and evil; 
becomes a free being. That which is cramped, 
dwarfed, and hidden within the chambered recesses 
of his own personal nature is manifested in full 
fruition in the light. The word of educational de- 
velopment, "I become," is partially exchanged for 
the word of real existence, " I am." 

Putting these matters together concerning the 
nature of man, we may say that education means 
that through his own effort, helped by an invigorat- 
ing environment, man becomes what he is intended 
to be ; but to become through one's own effort, through 
response to stimuli, what one is intended to be is to 
be free. The nature of man is freedom. 

Education does not imply a freedom of acting 
with an unmotived will, the so-called liberty of indif- 
ference, for the stimulating educational environment 
is present, presenting motives to consciousness to 
which to respond ; neither does it imply a freedom 
of will to respond to the strongest motive, which is 
determinism, for education observes the inequality 
of response of different pupils to the same stimuli, 
and of the same pupil at different times. These 
observations do not prove, but they are indicative of, 
the presence of an independent variable in the con- 
scious response of the pupil to educational motives. 
But in contrast to the Hberty of indifference and 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 277 

determinism, education implies the freedom of con- 
sciousness to realize in some measure, through effort 
of attention, its own selected ends. Such freedom 
alone is the adequate possibility of education, for 
only such a free being has a rational end to be self- 
actively attained; only such freedom permits the 
self-reaHzation of one's rational destiny. This is not 
an absolute freedom to do anything at any time ; it 
is a limited freedom to do something at some time. 
It permits man to utilize his world to attain his own 
rational ends; it prevents his being the puppet of 
circumstances, the creature of environment, and the 
slave of the strongest impulse. It is a freedom, not 
of the will as a part of consciousness, but of con- 
sciousness itself to direct its own thoughts, to attend 
to selected ideas, thereby inhibiting others, and so to 
enact its own purposes in conduct. The will is free 
because the consciousness is free. My ability to 
direct my thoughts is my ability to act as I will. As 
a man thinketh in his mind, so is he in his life. 

Since the mind is a unity, though its operations The Free- 
are many, the question concerning the freedom of ^^^^ 
the will is really a question concerning the freedom 
of mind. The failure to recognize this fact has con- 
fused much of the controversy on this old question. 
Since the days of Augustine, even until now, the old 
notion of the mind as divided into so many separate 
and distinct faculties has most conveniently served 
the purposes of polemics. On this old basis the free- 
will question is threshed out, as Leslie Stephen has 
somewhere observed. But once it is recognized that 
the mind is a unity with a diversity of functions, then 



278 The Philosophy of Education 

the question of freedom is reopened in a new way. 
On this basis it is no longer possible to say that the 
will is not free if it follows the strongest motive ; for 
the strongest motive itself is a product of the ener- 
getic, or attentive, aspect of consciousness. Through 
attending to an idea the mind makes its motive, and 
through attending to one idea to the exclusion of 
others, it makes the strongest motive. The strength 
of motives is not a given datum, like color or noise ; 
it is the repelling or appealing quality of an idea 
generated under the lens of attention. A casual 
glance of the mind over its present ideas reveals a 
series of strengths quite different from a studied 
scrutiny with a view to selection among them. To 
dwell upon a forbidden line of conduct may enhance 
its appealing power ; to wait and listen for the still 
small voice of right may magnify its volume till it 
seems to drown all other sounds. Thus it may not 
infrequently happen that a motive weakest at the 
start is strongest at the finish. To follow such a 
mind-made motive is not to be determined, but to be 
self-determined, that is, to be free. If the mind in 
its selection of ends of action makes us free, then 
are we free indeed. The act of choice between con- 
flicting motives, so frequently identified with the 
question of freedom, and so frequently, too, an appar- 
ently fated affair in view of the final strength of the 
motive to which we yield, is itself but the culmina- 
tion of the free mental process of attention. 

Often indeed in unimportant matters there is the con- 
scious sense of dual possibility at the very moment of 
choice, which is by no means illusory, but signifies the 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 279 

mind's ability to shift its attention, and so its choice. 
But in important matters, when the mind is finally fixed 
upon one course of action to the exclusion of others, 
there is also the conscious sense that this is the only 
thing to be done under the circumstances, in which 
case the apparently determined decision is itself due 
to the preceding free and voluntary process of attend- 
ing to all the possibilities, under the general purpose 
of following the best. No fact of introspection is 
more certain than my ability to direct my thoughts. 
But, through the recognized principle of ideo-motor 
action, to direct my thoughts is to direct my acts. 
Once a present idea is exclusively attended to, the 
nervous system takes care of its execution. It is not 
in man that walketh to direct his steps, for his nervous 
system may refuse its service, but it is in man that 
thinketh to direct his thoughts, and with an unim- 
paired nervous system, the deeds follow accordingly. 
On the pivot of attention the question of freedom 
turns, as Professor James has shown. He writes, 
" The question of fact in the free-will controversy 
is thus extremely simple. It relates solely to the 
amount of effort or consent which we can at ' any 
time put forth. Are the duration and intensity of 
this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they 
not.? Now, as I just said, it seems as if the effort 
were an independent variable, as if we might exert 
more or less of it in any given case." ^ To this intro- 
spective evidence, based on the unity of mental pro- 
cedure, is added the weight of the implications of 
education. Without the freedom to realize one's 

1 James, " Principles of Psychology," Vol. II, p. 571. 



28o The Philosophy of Education 

chosen end through effort, man, Hke the lower ani- 
mals, is a creature of heredity and environment, the 
fit subject of training with physical penalties and 
pleasures, but not of education as the self-realization 
of one's rational destiny. 

Being a wholly temporal process, education implies 
a real present freedom and is silent concerning a 
transcendental freedom. 
The Des- Third, the destiny of man. There are two notable 

tiny of Man. things about education that bear on this far-reaching 
question, and that go together, (a) Man's education 
as an empirical process is never completed ; (d) the 
possibility of man's development seems infinite. 
The No man is ever all he can be. At any point in his 

Finiteness of development he has a growing future. His purposes 
are not ended with his life, nor does he live in a spent 
world. Neither does the race in its development dis- 
cover any waning intellectual possibilities ; rather a 
growth in attainment, if not in capacity. Age does 
not wither, nor custom stale, the philosopher's love of 
truth, the artist's love of beauty, or the saint's love of 
virtue. These ideals of the human reason flee us as 
we pursue them in time. There is always more to 
know, and to love, and to do. With these funda- 
mental demands on the universe from the great 
deeps of man's nature, the incident in life called 
death seems apparently to have nothing to do. Man 
does not limit his will to know, to enjoy, and to 
achieve, to his life's unknown term of years. His 
plans bridge the chasm of death ; they call for an 
unending time in which their execution may be 
effected. 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 281 
Truth is as infinite as the thought of God, but The 



Infiniteness 
of Man's 



it is waiting to be revealed to man's growing intellect 
Beauty is as limitless as God's passion for the perfect, Reach. 
but it is waiting to be appreciated by man's develop- 
ing emotions. Goodness is as eternal as the will of 
God, but it is waiting to be realized through the finite 
will of man. These infinite ideals are the unattain- 
able objects of man's legitimate endeavor; they rep- 
resent the goal of his development; they are the 
prophets of his present nature and future progress. 
Man's development is an infinite process ; he is em- 
barked on an unending voyage ; he has matriculated 
in the University of the Universe, whence there is no 
graduation. The essence of eternity never gets itself 
fully expressed in the temporal order; time never 
completely includes the eternal meaning. Eternity 
possesses what time increasingly suggests. The true 
self of man he presses on to attain ; his present in- 
complete growing self is but the intimation of what 
he really is. As the most philosophic of the poets of 
the last century has said : — 

" Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be." 

Given this unlimited demand by man upon his 
world, what of it.!* Man has a nature to realize to 
which any amount of time assignable is inadequate. 
What follows ? Either the universe is irrational, with 
a good work begun which could not be continued, or 
man has the power of an endless life. But the tem- The Ration- 
poral order as so far forth developed discovers reason ^^qj-m.*^ 
at its core. The world is intelligible, appreciable, and order, 
conformable, to the mind of man. The development 



282 The Philosophy of Education 

of science, of art, and of history, presupposes a 
rational, passionate, and purposeful world-order. A 
caprice in nature indicative of an inherent irrationality 
has never appeared to the wondering and scrutinizing 
intelligence of man. If there be an unintelligible, 
unlovely, and wilful element in the eternal constitution 
of things, not once in historic time has it unmistakably 
declared itself. The error, the ugly, the evil, of the 
temporal order do not certainly declare the irra- 
tionality of the eternal; they may signify only the 
inadequacy of the temporal to express the whole 
meaning of the eternal. In the very inability of the 
infinite to get into the finite, as shown perhaps by 
these failures of the real to reach the ideal, may ulti- 
mately appear the very seal itself of the rationality of 
the eternal and temporal order. For, these very failures 
should we reasonably expect, in case the infinite and 
realized truth were the limit of temporal development. 
As Professor Royce^ has pointed out that the 
very possibility of error implies the actual exist- 
ence of an inclusive experience which recognizes 
and corrects the error, so the argument may be ex- 
tended to show that the very possibility of the ugly 
or the sinful implies an absolute experience within 
which they fall, are comprehended, and overcome. 
This present object is ugly because the critic's ex- 
perience is large enough to include it and also a 
standard to which it should conform. This present act 
is sinful because my insight is large enough to tell 
me I ought not to do it in the very moment of its 
committal. Without such insight there had been no 

1 " The Religious Aspect of Philosophy," pp. 384 ff. 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 283 

sin. To generalize, the ugly and sinful temporal 
order are such, if so at all, only because an eter- 
nal order includes them and judges them so to be. 
If the very appearances of irrationality in the world 
turn thus under inspection into evidence of its larger 
rationality, then do we return to the thought of what 
education demands of a rational world-order. 

Education apparently reveals in man a capacity The Destiny 
for infinite growth. Will the education of man, j^^^^^^^it 
which is never completed at any chosen moment 
in time, and for the eternal continuance of which 
man seems fit, go on unendingly.? It would be an 
irrational universe, one in which the part did not 
manifest the whole, if a process with so much human 
significance in it as education has, and crying out 
so for an unending time, were to be cut short with- 
out conclusion, like a refreshing river in desert sands. 
If all the evidences are trustworthy and our world is 
rational ; if the finite really manifests, though darkly, 
the infinite ; if the fragmentary suggests, though im- 
perfectly, the complete; if the part reveals, though 
in a riddle, the meaning of the whole ; if, finally, all 
temporal values get their ultimate recognition ; then 
there is for man an opportunity, guaranteed by his 
universe, and unabridged by the transitional incident 
in life named death, to finish his education, to achieve 
his destiny, and to grow unceasingly into the like- 
ness of the Infinite Being. This is the hope of 
immortality. 

Being a temporal process, and implying an infinite 
continuance wherein self-conscious personalities ap- 
proach their goal, education is silent concerning a 



284 The Philosophy of Education 

Spinozistic immortality of having aimed at the eternal 
while living. 

And since all minds with good brains respond more 
or less to educational endeavor, education has noth- 
ing to say concerning a conditional immortality. 

And, like morality, education discovers after its 
best appeals certain characters that prefer the dark- 
ness of evil to the way of light. It also recognizes 
the dependence of real happiness or misery upon 
the quality of the character, whether good or bad. 
Wherefore it cannot but assert the possibility of 
permanently choosing the evil as against the good, 
whereby men place themselves in the position of 
the dragon under St. Michael's foot, while the victory 
is eternally to the good. 
Summary of Reviewing now the philosophical implications of 
^ h^ 0?^°^°' education as a world-process in time, it would appear 
Education, that education means that the origin of man is God, 
the nature of man is freedom, and the destiny of man 
is immortality. Thus does philosophy, from the im- 
plications of education as well as from the Kantian 
intellectual agnosticism and moral ladder, though 
baking no bread, as Novalis observed, still procure 
for us, not by proofs but by plausible implications, — 
God, Freedom, and Immortality. 

It now remains for us only to incorporate these 
philosophical elements with our preceding empirical 
conception of education, in order that finally may 
appear in as complete a fashion as we can frame it 
our definition of the real and true nature of educa- 
tion. Philosophy has taught us to think that the 
adjustment to environment upon which biology in- 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 285 

sisted as the essence of education is really an endless 
process. The flow of time brings man momentarily 
and unendingly into a new and changing environ- 
ment requiring a continual adjustment thereto. Con- 
cerning that physical body upon whose proper 
treatment physiology could not too strongly insist, 
philosophy reminds us that it is the temporary 
vesture of the mind to be utilized while it lasts and 
then laid aside. As for that development of mind 
which psychology stressed as the natural fruitage of 
the educational process, philosophy reminds us that 
the mind of man is fashioned for a growth that is 
unceasing. Concerning that environment to which 
education adjusts man, and which sociology defined 
for us as the achievement of humanity in the world 
as it attempted to know, to appreciate, and to do, 
philosophy has said that it is God, manifesting Him- 
self in the temporal order, through man's ideals of 
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. And of the con- 
scious human being who all along has been our 
worthy object of educational endeavor, philosophy 
teaches us to think as free, capable of fashioning to 
some extent his own future according to his own 
plan. 

Putting all these matters together and summariz- Fifth Defi- 
ing our preceding total inquiry concerning the nature ^^^^^J^q^ 
of education, we reach the following last conception : 
Education is the eternal process of superior adjust- 
ment of the physically and mentally developed, free, 
conscious, hum,an being to God, as manifested in the 
intellectual, emotional, and volitional environment of 
man. 



286 The Philosophy of Education 

In the rich, brief words of Fichte, education is 
" eternal perfecting." It is the ever continuing 
process whereby the individual becomes the uni- 
versal. The category of ultimate reality is being; 
of temporal reality, and so of education, is becom- 
ing. Through education the individual becomes in 
time what he eternally is. Never-ending life is God's 
education of man into His own likeness. In the 
beautiful figure of Addison, man in his development 
toward the Infinite is like the asymptote approaching 
its limit, ever nearer, but never there. Or, in the 
language of Dr. Everett, who says from the point of 
view of thought what we have tried to say from the 
point of view of education : " The individual is the 
universal. This is the type of every logical proposi- 
tion. . . . Our fundamental and typical proposition 
is false. The individual is not the universal. The 
universal stretches far beyond the individual. A 
single man does not exhaust the possibilities of 
humanity. . . . The individual is not the universal, 
but it will be. Logic is sometimes taunted with being 
a progress into the infinite. This is its highest pride. 
Thought rushes from step to step, from form to form, 
striving to subdue this great discord. It seeks ever 
to find the universal in the individual, to lift the in- 
dividual to the universal. So soon as any point is 
reached, after all its pains and labor, it finds the gulf 
as wide as ever. 

This is not true of thought only, but, because 
thought is one with nature and history, it is true 
of these also. This, which is the moving power of 
thought, is the moving power of the universe. 



The Philosophical Aspect of Education 287 

Everywhere there is the same breach, the same 
struggle. Everywhere the universal strives to shape 
itself in the individual, and everywhere, failing its 
aim, it breaks to pieces its own work, and presses 
onward to new forms." ^ 

Even so does the Infinite come, and quickly, into 
all the lives of the sons of time ! 

REFERENCES ON THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECT OP 
EDUCATION 

Everett, Immortality and other Essays. 
Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, Chap. XVII. 
Hyde, God's Education of Man. 

James, The Will to Believe; essay, The Dilemma of Deter- 
minism. 

Kant, Theory of Ethics, Tr. Abbott, 4th Ed., pp. 218-231. 
Martineau, The Study of Religion, Vol. II, Bk. Ill, Chap. II, 
Bk. IV. ^ f , 

Royce, The Conception of God. 

1 Everett, « Science of Thought," pp. 106-107. 



INDEX 



The Numbers refer to the Pages 



Absolute, the, 264-268. 

Addison, 286. 

Adolescence. See Youth. 

Agassiz, Louis, 258. 

America, liberal education in, 248- 
250. 

Animals, the lower, as subject to 
training, 265-267. 

Apperception, 195-196. 

Architecture, 119. 

Aristotle, 34, 129, 208, 243, 245, 264. 

Arnold, Matthew, 243. 

Arnold, Thomas, 10. 

Art, as related to play, 78 ; its nature, 
117-118 ; its educational value, 127- 
130; the service of education to, 
162-163. 

Arts, the, 118-123. 

Athletics, as agency of physical 
education, 83-90; as related to 
play and gymnastics, 90; possi- 
ble checking influence on crime, 
156. 

Attention, concentrated, 203; and 
will, 277-280. 

Augustine, St., 142, 277. 

Automatism, as the end of educa- 
tion, 48-52. 

Bacon, definition of education, 252. 
Bain, Alexander, 56, 96, 213, 255. 
Baldwin, J. Mark, on play, 'j'j, 96, 

176; on imitation, 177, 180-181. 
Barnett, P. A., 17, 96. 
Bates, Arlo, 96. 
Beauty, its nature, 117-118. 
Beowulf, 121. 



Berthelot, on the educational value 
of mathematics, 116. 

Bible, the, in the public schools, 125- 
127. 

Biology, and education, Chap. II ; the 
three facts of, significant for educa- 
tion, 19, 29, 30 ; consequences for 
education of the biological point 
of view, 53-56; references on the 
biological aspect of education, 56. 

Body, the place of the, in education, 
57-59; the three questions con- 
cerning the education of the, 59; 
the influence of the, on the mind, 
59-66; how this influence is ef- 
fected, 59-62; its state as condi- 
tion of mental efficiency, 65-66 ; as 
influenced by mind, 67 ; the atten- 
tion it should receive, 67-72; the 
attention it is receiving, 72-90 ; the 
attention it has received in the past, 
91-94. 

Books, and experience, 165. 

JBoyer, C. C, on self-activity, 171. 

Brain, the, as the organ of the mind, 
34 ; proof of their correlation, 35- 
36 ; educational significance of this 
fact, 36-41 ; what education can 
do for it, 41-48 ; Waller on, 61 ; 
Sully on, 65 ; its state conditioning 
mental efficiency, 64-65 ; rest for 
the, 68-71 ; respect for limits of its 
capacity, 69-70. 

Brooks, W. K., 56. 

Browning, quoted, 260, 281. 

Buckle, his predictions in the history 
of civilization, 132, 136. 



289 



290 



Index 



Burnham, Wm. H., 96, 

Burrage and Bailey, 168. 

Butler, N. M., on the significance 
of infancy, 33, 56; on the meaning 
of education, 98, 99, 143; on edu- 
cational philosophy, 164, 168. 

California, the University of, 149. 

Carlyle, T., 131. 

Cerebrum, increasing size of, in 
mammals, 19-20; significance of 
this fact, 20-24. 

Character, as quality of an educated 
mind, 237-238. 

Characteristics, the, of an educated 
mind, 226-240. 

Child, study of the physical, 71-72 ; 
the intellect of the, 210-212; the 
feelings of the, 212 ; the will of the, 
213-215 ; and the race, 224-225. 

Childhood, as a stage of mental 
growth, 209-215. 

Chopin, 120. 

Christianity, Early, and physical edu- 
cation, 92 ; influence of, on the de- 
velopment of ethics, 142. 

Church, the, as an agency of civiliza- 
tion, 1-4, 186. 

Civilization, agencies of, 1-4. 

Coleridge, 122. 

Compayre, G., 17, 96. 

Conscience, as characteristic of an 
educated mind, 237-238. 

Consciousness, a permanent element 
of the educated mind, 49-52; a 
useful addition to the organism, 
53-54; the open doors of, 227-228. 

Constitutions, their nature, 138-139. 

Crime, and education, 154-158. 

Culture, as synonym for the educated 
mind, 242-244. 

Culture epochs, 222-223. 

Purriculum, its genesis, 145 ; of the 
Middle Ages, 147-148 ; an ordered, 
and interest, 195. 

Dartmouth College, 149. 
Darwin, on the atrophy of the aes- 
thetic sense, 129-130. 



Davidson, Thomas, 17. 

De Garmo, Charles, 17, 188 ; on in- 
terest, 190, 191 ; on drudgery. 191- 
192; on effort, 205-206, 255. 

Destiny, the, of man, 280-284. 

Development, internal ways of men- 
tal, 174-175 ; the stages of mental, 
209-220. 

Dewey> John, 9, 17 ; on the relation of 
the school to society, 152 ; on the 
changes in the curriculum, 159, 
165, 168 ; on genetic and rational 
psychology, 173, 188; on interest, 
189; on the school population, 
249, 255, 256. 

Dexter and Garlick, 255. 

Dickens, Charles, 188. 

Donaldson, Henry, on the effect of 
education on the brain, 43 ; on in- 
heritance of educability, 46, 56, 96 ; 
on the end of education, 240-241. 

Dualism, its error, 269-270. 

Dutton, S. T., 168. 

Educability, its advantage over in- 
stinct, 24-27 ; inheritance of, 45-48. 

Education, broad and narrow con- 
ceptions of, 5-6 ; points of view in 
the study of, 7-13 ; the history of, 
7-8; the science of, 8-10; the 
practice of, 11 ; the philosophy of, 
11-14; ^^d the central nervous 
system, 38-41 ; FIRST DEFINITION 
OF, 52 ; a utility, 54 ; and self-ex- 
pression, 55-56; Second Defi- 
nition OF, 95; as viewed by 
sociology, 100; as reproducing 
racial experience, 145-150 ; THIRD 
Definition of, 150; the con- 
servative effect of, 151-152; the 
preservative effect of, 152-160 ; and 
crime, 154-158 ; its supply to social 
demand, 158-160; the productive 
effect of, 160-163; its service to 
art, 162-163; sociological conse- 
quences for, 164-167; and imita- 
tion, 175-187; and interest, 187- 
198 ; and effort, 198-206 ; what it 
is not, 220-222 ; as expression, 221 ; 



Index 



291 



as cultural, 221 ; the characteristics 
of an educated mind, 226-240 ; the 
psychological ideal of, 240-242; a 
liberal, 244-250; FOURTH DEFI- 
NITION OF, 251 ; other definitions 
of, 251-252; as the making of a 
man, 252-254; transition to the 
philosophy of, 254-255; a world- 
process, 259-260 ; a temporal pro- 
cess, 260-262 ; the implications of, 
263-284; Fifth Definition of, 
285. 

Efficiency, the degree of mental, 64. 

Effort, as agency of mental develop- 
ment, 175 ; and education, 198-206, 
273-275 ; its nature, 199-200 ; its 
importance, 200-201 ; how to culti- 
vate, 201-203; and interest, 203- 
206, 

Ehot, C. W., on the method of teach- 
ing, 10, 17; on inheritance of 
educability, 46 ; on college athletics, 
85-89 ; on the function of education 
in a democratic society, 154; on 
changes in the people and the 
university, 159; on the individual 
and society, 164-165, 168 ; on self- 
knowledge, 230; on the imagi- 
nation, 232 ; on academic culture, 

244. 255- 

Emerson, 131, 154; on the impor- 
tance of the teacher, 184. 

Environment, the nature of the pu- 
pil's, 97 ; the method of the pupil's 
adjustment thereto, 99-100; its 
elements, 101-102; the nature of 
the intellectual, 103-110 ; the nature 
of the emotional, 117-130; the na- 
ture of the volitional, 130-145 ; 
criminal, improved by education, 
157; of man is God, 271-272. 

Everett, C. G., on the individual and 
the universal, 286-287. 

Evil, and the world-order, 281-283. 

Falkner, R. P., on the increase of 
crime, 157-158. 

Faraday, on the training of the judg- 
ment, 235-236. 



Faunce, W. H. P., 202. 

Fichte, 104, 159, 286. 

Fiske, John, on the significance of 
infancy, 32-33, 56. 

Freedom, the goal of history, 134- 
135 ; as characteristic of an edu- 
cated mind, 239 ; the nature of, 
273-280, 

Free-will, 199, 273-280. 

Froebel, on play, 80, 93, 94, 255. 

Froude, 168. 

God, the conception of, 263-273. 

Goethe, 122. 

Gordy, J. P., on imitation and moral- 
ity, 181, 256. 

Gray, Asa, 258. 

Greece, physical education in, 86, 
91-92. 

Green, J. R., 131. 

Groos, Karl, on play, 'j'j, 96. 

Group System, the, of studies, 148- 
150. 

Growth, the mottoes of, 4-5. 

Guyau, M. J., 49; on the nature of 
consciousness, 50, 56. 

Gymnastics, 81-83 1 ^^ related to play 
and athletics, 90. 

Habit, formation of, 43-45 ; the phys- 
iology of, 62-63, 202; the habit 
of work as characteristic of an edu- 
cated mind, 238. 

Halleck, R, P., on the education of the 
central nervous system, 38, 42, 56. 

Ham, C. H., 96. 

Hamilton, Alexander, on the prob- 
lem of education, 188. 

Hamilton, Sir Wm., on the greatness 
of mind, 263. 

Hanus, Paul H., on education as a 
social study, 164, 168. 

Happiness, as characteristic of an 
educated mind, 240. 5 

Harris, Wm. T., 17, 56 ; on work and 
play, 75; on games, 78, 96, 129; 
on history, 143, 168; on self- 
activity, 171 ; on the stages of 
thinking, 219, 256, 287. 



292 



Index 



Hartwell, E. M., 96. 

Hegel, 3, 58, 104, 132, 134, 168; on 

the nature of education, 238. 
Helwald, 132. 
Heraclitus, 172. 
Herbart, 187; on interest, 190, 192, 

193; on the relation of interest to 

will, 197, 223, 224, 238, 256. 
Herodotus, 131. 
History, its nature, 131- 135; as a 

science, 135-137; its educational 

value, 142-145. 
Hoar, G. F., on college education, 

233-234. 235- 
Holmes, O. W., 28, 253. 
Home, an agency of civilization, 1-4, 

186-187. 
Homer, 121, 122. 
Howerth, Ira W., 168. 
Humanities, their conservative effect, 

161. 
Hutchinson, Woods, 96. 
Huxley, on habit, 44, 96 ; on a liberal 

education, 250, 256. 
Hyde, Wm. De W., 287. 

Idealism, 105 ; idealistic theism, 268- 

273- 

Imagination, as characteristic of the 
educated mind, 230-233. 

Imitation, 175-187 ; the nature of, 
176 ; its effects on mental develop- 
ment, 177-183 ; and self-conscious- 
ness, 178 ; and originality, 178-180 ; 
and morality and religion, 180-182 ; 
educational uses of, 183-187. 

Immortality, 280-284. 

Infancy, the prolonged period of, 
30-31; its final cause, 31-32; its 
significance, 32-34. 

Interest, as agency of mental devel- 
opment, 175 ; in education, 187- 
198; its advocates, 187-188; its 
modernness, 188 ; its nature, 189- 
191; its importance, 191-194; and 
drudgery, 191-192 ; its power, 192- 
193 ; as the aim of instruction, 193- 
194 ; the art of securing, 194-197 ; 
ultimate interests, 201-202. 



James, Wm., 9, 17; on the evolution 
of the hemispheres, 23-24 ; on the 
advantage of educability over in- 
stinct, 25-27, 56, 64, 86, 176; on 
interest, 196-197; on effort, 199- 
200, 202-203 ; o'^ the great thing 
in all pedagogy, 223, 256 ; on ani- 
mal intelligence, 265-266; on at- 
tention and freedom, 279, 287. 

Jefferson, Thomas, on the instruction 
of the people, 154. 

Jehovah, 269-270. 

Jerome, St., 92, 

Jesus, the influence of His personal- 
ity, 186, 272-273. 

Jevons, W. S., 8, no. 

Jordan, D. S., 184. 

Judgment, as characteristic of an edu- 
cated mind, 233-236 ; the elements 
of a trained, 234-235. 

Juvenal, 92. 

Kant, 104, 141, 158, 237, 238 ; on the 
influence of education, 41, 252, 287. 

Kavana and Beatty, 184. 

Kindergarten, its possible checking 
influence on crime, 156. 

Knowledge, as characteristic of an 
educated mind, 229. 

Ladd, G. T., on a liberal education, 
245, 256. 

Lankester, E. Ray, on the mammalian 
cerebrum, 20, 56. 

Laurie, S. S., 96. 

Law, its nature, 139-140. 

Lazarus, 76. 

Leland Stanford Jr. University, 149. 

Liberal Education, courses necessary 
for a, 146-147 ; its nature, 244-250. 

Literature, 121-122; its educational 
value, 128-129. 

Localization of mental function, his- 
tory of, 34. 

Locke, 37, 72, 93. 

Longfellow, H. W., 122. 

Lotze, 168. 

Lowell, A. Lawrence, 86. 

Luther, 153. 



Index 



^93 



Man, the characteristics of, as an 
educable being, 14-17 ; as an ani- 
mal, 18 ; the intellect of, 218-219 ; 

. the feelings of, 219 ; the will of, 219 ; 
the making of, 252-254 ; the origin 
of, 263-273; the freedom of, 273- 
280; the immortality of, 280-284; 
the only educable being, 265-267 ; 
his finite grasp, 280; his infinite 
reach, 281. 

Manhood, as a stage of mental 
growth, 218-220. 

Manouvrier, on the caus6 of large 
brains, 36. 

Manual training, 73-74; its possible 
influence in checking crime, 156. 

Martineau, James, 168; on culture, 
243, 287. 

Mathematics, the educational value 
of, 115-116. 

Matter, its nature, 103-104, 270. 

Maudsley, 37. 

McKendrick and Snodgrass, on the 
effect of mental exercise on the 
brain, 42. 

McLellan and Dewey, on interest, 
194 ; on effort, 200, 256. 

McMurry, C. A., 17. 
"■"'•Method, use of, in teaching, 8-10; 
stages of, 223-224. 

Middle Ages, physical education in, 
92-93 ; curriculum of, 147-148. 

Mill, John Stuart, on specialization, 
248. 

Milton, John, on physical education, 
93; on the nature of education, 
222. 

Mind, the influence of, on the body, 
67, 68; its nature, 105-106; as 
real, 263-264; the realized Abso- 
lute, 264-265 ; the self-active Abso- 
lute, 265-268 ; the freedom of, 277- 
280. 

Models, the use of, 183-186. 

Mommsen, on mathematics and lan- 
guage, 146. 

Morality, its nature, 140-142; and 
imitation, 180-182. 

Morris, William, on art, 122. 



Munroe, J, P., 17. 

Miinsterberg, Hugo, 134, 166, 168, 

230, 256. 
Music, 120-121. 

Napoleon, 132, 158. 

Natorp, 164. 

Natural selection, the mental basis 
of, 27-28. 

Nature, and nurture, 29-30 ; the phi- 
losophy of, 261. 

Nervous system, the, 59-62; and 
education, 38-41. 

Neurosis, and psychosis, 63-64. 

Nineteenth century, and physical 
education, 93. 

Novalis, 284. 

Origin, the, of man, 263-273. 
Outlook, The, on " The University as 
a Wealth Producer," 161. 

Painter, F. V. N., 17. 

Painting, 1 19-120. 

Palmer, G. H., 256. 

Pantheism, its error, 269-270. 

Paul, St., 181-182, 270. 

Paulhan, on automatism as the end 
of education, 48-49. 

Paulsen, on the fitness of our world 
to educate man, 262. 

Payne, W. H., 153, 188. 

Pearson, Karl, on inheritance of psy- 
chical and physical characters in 
man, 46-47. 

Persia, physical education in, 91. 

Personality, the, of teachers, 184-186. 

Pestalozzi, 185, 256; on the nature of 
education, 222. 

Philosophy, the, of education, Chap. 
VIII; the method of, 257-258 ; the 
question of the philosophy of edu- 
cation, 258-259; idealistic theism, 
268-273 ; the summary of the phi- 
losophy of education, 284. 

Physiology and education. Chap. 
Ill; references on the physiological 
aspect of education, 96. 

Pickard, J. L., 17. 



294 



Index 



Plato, 31, 104, 118, 141, 153, 186, 242, 
245, 252, 253, 261. 

Play, 74-81 ; the nature of, 74-76 ; 
the explanation of, 76-78 ; the func- 
tion of, 78-81; as related to gym- 
nastics and athletics, 90. 

Poe, E. A., 122. 

Potential, the, and the actual, 208- 
209. 

Practical, the, the basis of the theo- 
retical, 53. 

Proal, 157. 

Psychology, and education. Chaps. 
VI and VII; the insufficiency of 
rational, 172; the services of ge- 
netic, 173. 

Psychosis, and neurosis, 63-64; refer- 
ence to G. S. Stout on, 66. 

Putnam, Daniel, 256. 

Rabelais, 93. 

Ranke, on history, 132. 

Rationality, the, of the world-order, 
281-283. 

Reighard, J., 17. 

Rein, W., on the purpose of educa- 
tion, 238. 

Religion, the nature of, 122-127 > re- 
ligious instruction in the public 
schools, 124-125 ; the Bible in the 
pubHc schools, 125-127; and imi- 
tation, 182. 

Richardson, Charles F., on the na- 
ture of literature, 121, 

Rome, physical education in, 92. 

Rosenkranz, J. K. F., 12; on the 
education of man and animals, 266- 
267. 

Rousseau, 74, 79, 93, 153, 187, 188, 
192 ; on interest, 192-193. 

Rowe, S. H., on the physical nature 
of the child, 71-72. 

Royce, Josiah, 17, 176; on self-con- 
sciousness and imitation, 178, 256 ; 
on the possibility of error, 282, 287. 

Sadler, M. E., 71, 96. 
Schiller, 76, 81. 
Schleiermacher, 123. 



School, the, as an agency of civiliza- 
tion, 1-4. 

Schurman, J. G., on interest, 191. 

Science, the educational value of, 
112-117. 

Sciences, the classification of the, 102, 
107-110; how related to the arts, 
110-112; their effect on progress, 
161. 

Sculpture, 119. 

Sedgwick, Adam, on the nature of 
education, 29. 

Self-activity, the notion of, 170-172. 

Self-consciousness and imitation, itS* 

Self-development, 207-225 ; time as 
its presupposition, 207-208; the 
potential and the actual, 208-209; 
the stages of mental growth, 209- 
220 ; the use of these stages in edu- 
cating, 222-225. 

Self-knowledge, as characteristic of 
an educated mind, 229-230. 

Self-realization, partly attained in 
education, 276. 

Senses, the, trained in an educated 
mind, 227-228. 

Shakespeare, 115, 121, 122, 129. 

Shaw, E. R., 17. 

Sin, and the rationality of the world- 
order, 281-283. 

Sociology, and education. Chaps. IV 
and V ; the social environment of 
the pupil, 97-99; the method of 
the pupil's adjustment thereto, 99- 
100 ; the questions of the sociologi- 
cal aspect of education, loi ; social 
effects of education, 150-163 ; social 
demand and educational supply, 
158-160 ; its practical consequences 
for education, 164-167. 

Socrates, 99, 115, 141, 186. 

Spencer, Herbert, 12, 17, 18, 19, 56, 
72, 76, 81, 94, 96, 104, 136, 153; on 
the nature of education, 222. 

Spinoza, 269. 

Starbuck, E. D., 17. 

State, the, as an agency of civiliza- 
tion, 1-4, 186. 

Staude, R., on interest, 193-194. 



Index 



295 



Stephen, Leslie, 277. 

Stout, G. F., 61, 66, 96. 

Stratton, G. M., on imitation and 

originality, 179; on the influence 

of the teacher, 184-185. 
Sully, J., on the brain, 65, 96. 

Tarde, G., 176. 

Taste, as characteristic of an educated 
mind, 236-237. 

Teacher, the influence of the, 195; 
the function of the, 273-274. 

Teaching, as an art and science, iii. 

Tennyson, A., 103. 

Text-books, 195. 

Theism, idealistic, 268-273. 

Thilly, Frank, 262, 

Thwing, C. F., 163. 

Time, presupposed by self-develop- 
ment, 207-208; education a tem- 
poral process, 260-262. 

Tolerance, as characteristic of an 
educated mind, 239-240. 

Tompkins, A., 17. 

Trinity, the philosophical doctrine of 
the, 272-273. 

Tucker, W. J., on the nature of edu- 
cation, 230. 

Tyndall, on the use of the imagina- 
tion, 231. 

Ugly, the, and the world-order, 281- 
283. 



Virgil, 122. 

Vocation in life, as an agency of civ- 
ilization, 1-4. 

Volitions, the, the third element of 
the curriculum, 130-145 ; their edu- 
cational value, 142-145. 

Wagner, Richard, on art, 118. 

Walker, F. A., on athletics, 89, 96. 

Waller, on the brain, 61. 

Warner, F., 96. 

Washington, G., on the enlighten- 
ment of public opinion, 153-154. 

Wellington, Duke of, on habit, 44. 

Welton, J., 17. 

Wheeler, B. I., on American culture, 
249. 

WiUiams College, 149. 

Williams, S. G., 17. 

Withers, H. W., on education as an 
instinct of society, 159-160. 

Woodward, C. M., 96. 

Wordsworth, W., 121; on beauty, 
122. 

Work, the habit of, 238. 

World-order, the rationality of the, 
281-283. 

Yale College, 149. 

Youth, as a stage of mental growth, 
215-218; the intellect of, 216; the 
feelings of, 216-217; the will of, 
217-218. 



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